Quotes About Culture

If you look at pop culture as the main picture you see of black men, all these kind of threatening pictures and - I think those of us who are artists and who are in media have to think carefully about what those pictures are.

Japan functions on the basis of everyone sharing certain assumptions, where each person knows his part in a larger whole. The foreigner sits outside and is threatening. If he comes in, that's the most threatening of all.

Always, European art cinema has been the most threatening and the grimmest and the most transgressive, I think.

I lament that Paris can be a threatening space for Jews, Roma, Africans and Arabs, but the truth is, as a black American, I've never felt safer or less harassed anywhere.

California feels like Colombia but with less threats. I don't have to be constantly looking over my shoulder.

In the late '60s, there were the the three B's: The Beatles, Batman, and Bond.

As the French say, there are three sexes - men, women, and clergymen.

Mind you, the Elizabethans had so many words for the female genitals that it is quite hard to speak a sentence of modern English without inadvertently mentioning at least three of them.

The class has become over the years fairly large, running to three hundred or more, but I always insist upon reading all the student folklore collections myself. Although this is a tall order, I look forward to it because I learn so much from it.

I admire pop songs that are perfect at three minutes.

My mom is awesome. She's really young. My mom is 40, and she raised me listening to Nirvana and Courtney Love and Coldplay, Gin Blossoms, The Cranberries, and stuff. Like, my early, early memories are of being a little kid running around in floral skirts and Doc Martens when I was, like, three.

Somebody told me once it takes an Americana song five minutes to say what a country song says in three - so I try to write country songs. But really, all good music is just soul music.

I'm three-quarters Russian, so I've always felt an outsider. But I don't think you can be in a play with John Of Gaunt's 'This sceptred isle' speech and not feel proud to be British.

It was weird being a kid in the Midlands where outside everybody is white and speaks in a certain way but when you go home nobody speaks that way and everybody looks like you. Every day was this weird threshold crossing.

There were very few British black women on TV or in music when I was a teenager; when you're growing up, you need someone you can identify with. I remember at Christmas being bought a doll that didn't look anything like me, so I threw it away.

Bearing an eternal longing for Jewishness, I threw myself in all directions and left to work for another people. I am not one of those lucky ones raised in their own environment, whose work is normal.

My hair was curly, and everyone else's was straight or in micro braids. I didn't have a lot of money, so I shopped at thrift stores. And I'm petite - I never looked shapely. I remember thinking, 'Will I ever have that stereotypical round, full butt that people think most black women have? I had to find another way to feel good about myself.

I just love drawing on past human cultures; that's a thrill for me.

My kids miss me when I'm away, but I don't mind living out of a suitcase. The U.K., U.S., France, Germany, Iraq... it's such a thrill meeting people of different cultures, learning about and from them. It's changed my perception about life, humanity and spirituality.

The ancient media of speech and song and theater were radically reshaped by writing, though they were never entirely supplanted, a comfort perhaps to those of us who still thrill to the smell of a library.

They made me use an accent, which I wasn't thrilled about because a lot of us, obviously, don't have them.

The self was a very strange concept to me until I came to America, and my child was born with that entitlement, and that just thrilled me.

I was thrilled that Sadiq Khan was so in support of the idea of culture being at the centre of a city and the idea that it is everyone's right. It can't be a matter of privilege or chance. It should be something everyone can have in their life, and that means knowing what it is.

I'm happy with studio infiltration, but I'm thrilled when I see 12- to 20-year olds walking down the street with Beats and not two-dollar earbuds.