Quotes About Culture

In Iran, we had a really good life. Everything is good. Iran is considered, I think, a Third World country. I don't know what it is considered but it's not considered to be up there.

And there are so many people in the third world suffering so horribly right now, and we are so focused on ourselves and our culture that a lot of things are showing up in our culture that are making it impossible for us to focus on others. We're so self-focused.

Often Hollywood crews go into third world countries and I don't believe they behave well.

I think growing up in South Africa, and then moving to Canada, I'm just genuinely interested in the difference between the First World and the Third World, immigration, and how the new, globalized world is beginning to operate. All of those things run through my mind a lot.

I like to be called a Nigerian rather than somebody from the Third World or the developing or whatever.

Because of the fact that we grew up in a Third World country, we see how things are from the outside point of view.

In Grade 2, when we had to do a presentation in front of the class, I'd always do things about Ireland or Italy. I could draw maps; I could name all the capitals: I was completely drawn to other lands. I discovered with time that it's a thirst for other people, for otherness, for something fascinating and mysterious.

One of the stranger things about me is that I was raised as an Orthodox Jew. I went to a yeshiva until I was thirteen years old and spoke fluent Hebrew.

I learned to cook when I was ten, and I could cook a whole meal for my family by thirteen - and I'm talking the chapatis as well.

A glass of whisky in Scotland in the thirties cost less than a cup of tea.

In my real movie-going days, which were the thirties, you didn't stand in line. You strolled down the street and sallied into the theater at any hour of the day or night.

For some reason, I spent my early thirties reading as much postwar Hungarian fiction as I could get my hands on.

My mates Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe have put together thirty one episodes of a really really nice podcast at Rice as part of the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The 'Cultures of Energy Podcast' is so good!

I remember, my mom, she's lived in Spain for about thirty years, and we were playing the Royal Albert Hall, and she was with some friends from New York. Morrissey came out with the sign 'The Queen is Dead,' and my mom's friends are like, 'Oh my God.' They took it literally.

I feel like I'm a product of this generation where everybody listens to charts with diverse music.

I am part of this generation with 'Pirates of the Caribbean' and 'Peter Pan.' I think we all grew up in this culture of pirates.

The rise to prominence of the Saudi novel in Arabic is the great man-bites-dog of recent world literature. Saudi Arabia is a country without a free press, where European styles and forms are distrusted and where the female half of the population became literate only in this generation.

Thomas Friedman's 'The World is Flat' sold more copies in India than in the U.K. The market for go-getting business books or wonkish tomes by corporate moguls posing as philosopher kings has grown dramatically in modernising China and India.

'Black cinema' I don't even know what that means. It's just cinema. When Paul Thomas Anderson makes a movie, we don't just say it's 'white cinema.'

Stories serve the purpose of consolidating whatever gains people or their leaders have made or imagine they have made in their existing journey thorough the world.

I'm a huge fan of Green Day's album 'American Idiot'; it was just a whole, very thorough experience.

Count Dracula had directed me to go to the Golden Krone Hotel, which I found, to my great delight, to be thoroughly old-fashioned, for of course I wanted to see all I could of the ways of the country.

Belief demands that you dispense with illusion after illusion, while contemporary common sense requires continual, fluffy pretending - pretending that might as well be systematic, it's so thoroughly incentivised by our culture.

In the late 1950s, self-esteem hadn't yet been invented. High schools saw their sole mission as preparing students thoroughly for academic work.