Quotes About Culture

Food from Quebec is not known to be amazing. Actually, even though you can eat really, really well in Montreal, it's crazy. It's one of the best cities I eat in, but typical Quebec food is like food from people that work in the woods. It's potatoes, meat and sauce.

Of all the '60s - there was Elvis, there was the Beatles, there was the British invasion, Jimmy Hendrix, and Woodstock - the No. 1 record was 'The Twist.'

People say Altamont was the 'end of the '60s.' It was unfortunate, but at the time we didn't think of it as signaling anything. The fact that nobody got killed at Woodstock is amazing because that was half a million people. We only had 300,000 at Altamont.

I was at Woodstock. In the mud.

Growing up, I listened to a lot of American singer/songwriters, so a lot of Tom Waits, Paul Simon - also Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. And bands like Vampire Weekend.

Any nobody from the folk blues world could avoid being influenced by Woody Guthrie, who is actually of Scottish-Irish ancestry.

I absorbed the vinyl of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Jack Elliott, to Michael McClure and then into the Beat poets, Allen Ginsberg. At campus, we were absorbing that stuff. We looked to America.

Very few people have actually read Freud, but everyone seems prepared to talk about him in that Woody Allen way. To read Freud is not as much fun.

I don't know if you have ever seen the Woody Allen film 'Annie Hall,' but it is, in a way, to Los Angeles and 'Hollywood' what 'This Is Spinal Tap' is to many musicians.

People think of Jews as the Woody Allen stereotype, the nebbishy kind of thing, but that's not the kind of Jews I know. I know plenty of Israelis and plenty of tough guys that are Jewish. So, I think it makes sense that Jews play metal.

Woody Allen movies are like Beatles songs. I can't name my favorite without you immediately naming a better one.

Woody Allen stayed so good because he never left New York. Howard Stern stayed so good because he never left New York - Mel Brooks when he just got out of New York was doing 'Blazing Saddles;' when he left New York he started doing stuff like 'Robin Hood Men In Tights' - he was in L.A. too long. He lost the edge.

When I went to Paris, I had a lot of ideas about it that were formed in the sort of ether that flows about if you watch too many recent Woody Allen movies or took French classes as a kid. I was certainly full of those.

Our distorted media culture sees men as subjects and women as objects; in films, Woody Allen gets older and older and still dates 20-year-old babes; movies about women are called 'chick flicks,' and men make fun of them.

I consider myself a Jewish writer, like all my heroes: Tom Stoppard, David Mamet, Philip Roth, Arthur Miller, Woody Allen.

When I tell people I spent almost a year in Paris, I know they imagine something out of a Woody Allen movie, which it wasn't, of course. I was just working in a clothes shop, but I was aware that it was exciting.

The calling of the humanities is to make us truly human in the best sense of the word.

The death of a language. The word has the same kind of reluctant resonance as it has when we talk about the death of a person. And indeed, that's how it should be. For that's how it is. A language dies only when the last person who speaks it dies.

I mean, where I come from, 'communism' is not a terrible word.

I cannot read a single word of the Hindoos without being elevated.

The people and the cultures of what is known as Africa are older than the word 'Africa.' According to most records, old and new, Africans are the oldest people on the face of the earth. The people now called Africans not only influenced the Greeks and the Romans, they influenced the early world before there was a place called Europe.

In our house, the word of Louis B. Mayer became the law.

Today when we say the West we are already referring to the West and to Russia. We could use the word 'modernity' if we exclude Africa, and the Islamic world, and partially China.

I'm actually all for political correctness. If you want to work to change the usage of a word that's discriminatory then fine, I'm behind you. But that's a conversation that needs to be had in the culture. You can't just decide that commonly used parts of a language are evil and that the people who didn't get the memo must be bad people.