Quotes About Culture

I always like to sing barefoot, but when I first started doing these dates with the symphonies, I of course thought I should clean up my act, being a Jewish girl from Long Island with a little bit of a trucker mouth. So I wore a gown and some high heels.

I'd be much more likely to watch the latest Tarantino movie than to listen to a Mahler symphony.

Not only are most of our citizens fathomlessly ignorant of the glories of American literature, a fast-growing percentage of our students are no longer taught much about any works of American art, be they novels, paintings, symphonies or ballets.

In Montreal, when I grew up, I'd go to the Notre-Dame Basilica, a gorgeous cathedral in town. I'd listen to huge symphony orchestras, Pavarotti singing operas; that was absolutely marvelous. I like that aspect of the cathedral, the spectacle.

Cincinnatians support a symphony, an opera, a ballet, museums, many galleries and theater groups.

Birmingham did a truly remarkable thing in building Symphony Hall, which is the finest concert hall in the U.K. and one of the best in the world. The city has supported music without putting on the brakes.

Music is such an important part of society, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra offers such great quality, and we just want to share it.

People have to see that there is a high degree of complexity about belonging to a gang. It's a symptom, not a problem.

I had always known that I was Jewish - we celebrated the holidays, we went to a synagogue - but I had never known that I was supposed to feel ashamed about it.

In my neighborhood, everyone had an opinion on the local cantor. You didn't go to a synagogue to listen to the rabbi's sermon. You went to listen to the cantor. It was like a concert.

I was Jewish, through and through, although in our house that didn't mean a whole lot. We never went to synagogue. I never had a Bar Mitzvah. We didn't keep kosher or observe the Sabbath. In fact, I'm not so sure I would have known what the Sabbath looked like if it passed me on the street, so how could I observe it?

My grandfather was a Russian-Jewish immigrant who lived in Northern Ireland and apparently when he sang in the synagogue he made everyone cry.

I was brought up a Jew but, you know, that way of being Jewish - the New York way. We were stomach Jews; we were Jewish-joke Jews. We were bagel Jews. We didn't go to synagogue. I'm frightened of synagogue to this day.

In America, we have this bell curve of certain values. And then we have another bell curve of different values, which is the Republican Party. And they're out of sync right now.

When people outside Korea think of 'K-pop,' most of them expect 'idols' with several members in a group, dancing in sync.

I have American friends in France, and when I meet with them, they tell me about everything that is wrong with France. I think there is a general expat syndrome, which means that whatever country you are in, you are always missing your own country and always thinking that the country you live in is actually not as good as it could be.

I like teams which repeat their style, clubs that are synonymous with one style.

My name is synonymous with corsets and ringlets.

I wouldn't want to do a Bollywood film per se, but I would like to do an Indian-language film. For some reason I think Bollywood has become synonymous with commercial cinema, which is song and dance and everything that is larger than life, and I am interested in the reality.

I've lived 16, 17 years of my life in Asia, and that's most of my life. I was born in Asia - I've lived cultures that are synonymous with Asian culture - but it's still not Asian enough for some people.

I so hate the term Bollywood. I know it's become synonymous with the industry but really we are 'Indian cinema.'

I like having a paperback original. And until literature catches up with the culture - the violence, language, syntax, compression, concision, complexity and diversity that the Internet offers - books still make sense.

What is attempted in these film is of course a synthesis. But it can be seen by someone who has his feet in both cultures. Someone who will bring to bear on the films involvement and detachment in equal measure.

I think that American music, for me, it's a synthesis of a lot of different things. But for me growing up in North Carolina, the stuff that I was listening to, the things that I was hearing, it was all about black music, about soul music.