Quotes About Culture

I've got a book of poetry by the bed, one of these big collections that goes back to the Greeks and Romans.

I am a patriot, but I must say that English poetry is the richest in the world.

I believe in the popularizing of art. But when you get right down to it, it's a bit of an elitist world. Not just economically elitist - how many people read poetry?

The higher Greek poetry did not make up fictitious plots; its business was to express the heroic saga, the myths.

I think poetry has lost an awful lot of its muscle because nobody knows any. Nobody has to memorize poetry.

There is a wonderful Hungarian literature, especially in lyric poetry.

I don't think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.

I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.

It is true that short forms of poetry have been cultivated in the Far East more than in modern Europe; but in all European literature short forms of poetry are to be found - indeed quite as short as anything in Japanese.

San Francisco has long been a leader in the arts, nurturing generations of painters, sculptors, poets, novelists, playwrights, film-makers, and performing artists and innovators of every kind.

I'm ashamed to admit that I very seldom read poetry, even though many of my friends are poets.

The American public does not know poets exist.

I put it to you that there are no British poets, there are no British novelists. I have heard myself described as one, but I think really I'm an English novelist; there are Scottish poets and Scottish novelists.

Alice Oswald. With Hughes and Heaney gone, people are looking around for the best British and Irish poets. Oswald is one of our finest.

My brother and I were brought up sort of thinking that we were English. I remember hearing the poet Roy Campbell on the radio and being quite shocked that he had a South African accent. I didn't know there were any South African poets.

It's very important to say that French doesn't belong to France and to French people. Now you have very wonderful poets and writers in French who are not French or Algerian - who are from Senegal, from Haiti, from Canada, a lot of parts of the world.

I grew up in Banaras on Kabir and other Hindi poets and then I got introduced to Faiz, Hasrat Mohani, Allama Iqbal and Majaaz. They took me to another facet of literature and drama.

I think every person either inherits or eventually makes up their own idea of what they are and who they are and what caused the world to be, and it seems to me that these stories of creation myth, adopted by different cultures - most of them are less insightful than the stories made up by individual poets and writers.

From the traditional point of view, I am not handsome.

I want to make movies about my country from my point of view.

There is this idea that it's very different from the French point of view to work in America blah, blah, blah. But I think it's different from one person to the other, not from one country to the other.

I have hidden my race for 22 books. I have hidden behind my married name, which is very Caucasian, because I didn't feel safe coming out with it. I didn't feel that the market would really accept me. I think I felt it's time to start bringing in an Asian-American point of view.

I think my Latino culture has equipped me with a different point of view than the rest of my counterparts, and seeing things from a different angle has helped me a lot. I feel very proud of my culture, of my Latino heritage.

It's crazy because I was 10 years old when 'Macarena' was all over the place, and I remember looking at it from a different point of view. I remember culturally how important that song was, even though people didn't really know what they were saying. It was more about the dance and the movement of it and the cultural side of it.