Quotes About Culture

The lively oral storytelling scene in Scots and Gaelic spills over into the majority English-speaking culture, imbuing it with a strong sense of narrative drive that is essential to the modern novel, screenplay and even non-fiction.

I'm a library user and I just don't hoard books. To me, they're for sharing.

Edinburgh is a great big black bastard of a city where there are ghosts of all kinds.

Edinburgh is alive with words.

One of Scotland's most important cultural exports - stories.

The 1950s is a key decade in the 20th Century. Each year has a distinctive flavour.

Scotland consistently produces world-class writers.

I'm proud of the culture I come from - we're a small country and a close-knit community.

Books have a vital place in our culture. They are the source of ideas, of stories that engage and stretch the imagination and most importantly, inspire.

When you think about the period in which Agatha Christie's crime novels were written, they are actually quite edgy for the time.

My father could talk about the Romany way of life and its culture. He could talk about freedom and the Scottish spirit. But that was all he could talk about. I was desperate for someone to talk to but there was just nobody there.

It is one of the benchmarks of a culture I always think – the page at which it operates. A good way to measure it is to order a taxi and see how irate local people get if it is late.

Can I fetch you something, madam? A cup of tea?' In the old days she'd have been 'miss' and he'd have offered her a cocktail.

I'm drawn to the 1950s for lots of reasons - everything from the fashion to the increasing sense of freedom and modernity that builds throughout the decade.

Reticence was clearly a national characteristic, even if the other person spoke French.

Social and cultural history is often comprised of whatever diaries and letters remain and that is down to chance and wide open to interpretation.

For me, writing stories set, well, wherever they're best set, is a form of cultural curiosity that is uniquely Scottish - we're famous for travelling in search of adventure.

If we don't value the people who inspire us (and money is one mark of that) then what kind of culture are we building?

What used to be edgy (divorces) has become mainstream and what used to be mainstream (racism and sexism) has become shocking.

An important part of deciding where we want to go, as a society and culture, is knowing where we have come from, and indeed, how far we have come.

As it stands there is a very strong argument that as the book trade becomes increasingly corporate it's our literary heritage that is at risk - a vital part of our culture.

Writers are a product of where we come from but by looking at alternatives to the culture in which we live, we can find ways to change and hopefully improve it.

The only trouble with being female in Pakistan is that it allows for two possible modes of behaviour--either you can be sweet and simple, or you can be cold and proud.

Their lives were and are consumed with the generally dreadful business of being Russian.