Quotes About Perspective

I'm not trying to unite Asian people with my music.

People in the United Kingdom and outside the United States share my bemusement with the United States that America doesn't share with itself.

Like Canada, we very much wanted the United Nations to be a relevant and effective body. But once those efforts failed, we no longer saw things from a multilateral perspective. For us, now, it is much more basic than that. It is about family.

Sure, jets are fast and economical, but, oh my, what fun we've lost and what leisure we've sacrificed in the race to efficiency. Somehow, stepping onto a plane and zooming across the United States in a matter of hours doesn't hold a candle to the dear, old-fashioned train ride.

There is just a small difference between the United States and Russia - Russia does not teach the whole world democracy.

People ask if I miss it, but they don't understand that American culture is so ubiquitous that there's nothing to miss. I don't see myself moving back. It's not that I hate the United States. I just always thought it would be a shame not to live in a foreign country.

I never thought that I would come to live in the United States. I was not pursuing the American dream.

If I were to look in the United States or in Europe, in some of the garages, you would have a Bentley or two Bentleys or a high-end Mercedes, and you may find a Smart also in that same garage because that person thinks it's a fun extra car to have. He may have four cars but also have a Smart because he thinks it is cute.

Growing up, I didn't realize how unique it was to live on the border of the United States and Mexico. It wasn't until I started doing interviews with the press that I actually began to appreciate just how cool it was that I would cross the international border every single day from Tijuana into San Diego to go to school.

The United States is very good at understanding itself, and very bad at understanding others.

To me, traveling in the United States isn't that much fun. I like to go elsewhere and experience different cultures.

Whenever anybody says what you do isn't good, it's always unflattering and makes me feel uncomfortable. But when the person who's in charge of the United States of America says, 'Not good,' I'm like, 'Oh.' It's a little unflattering.

I lived in a bubble: my whole entire military career where I thought that everything was perfect. And I thought that every time we went overseas and we fought for this country, we were doing it because we were trying to get other people a sliver of the greatness that we have here in the United States of America.

I want music to really unite people, more than the way a pop single unites people. I want to unite people through their pain and really change mentalities, change minds, and change perspectives.

Some may look on my work as being corny or old hat and wonder if my observations on the typical family are passe, what with the single-parent family and mixed family units.

The larger truth, the universal truth that you can give in a novel, is far greater than what you can give through journalism.

The universal narrator knows all and can enter a character's head any time he chooses.

When I was writing stories about Chinese American characters in my fiction classes, I'd get comments like, 'You should consider writing more universal stories.' But anything can happen to a Chinese American girl - just as much of the canon of English literature involves white men or women.

I worked on 'USA Today' as a topic for while. I tried to do something on hand chairs, chairs that look like hands. I really tried. But some topics are not truly universal.

I like the tragedies way more than the comedies because they're so universal.

So the idea that there is nothing essential, in the sense that there are no human universals, is dogma. Ask most anyone who is going to be shot at dawn.

I was the assistant to the editor-in-chief of 'Esquire Magazine.' And my experience as an assistant was really best case scenario. My boss was absolutely the greatest boss I could have asked for. But I think there's something universal about being an assistant, regardless of whether or not your boss is the greatest or a complete terror.

Sometimes if you can tell one personal story with a lot of sincerity, it can become a universal story.

Though we explore in a culturally-conditioned way, the reality we sketch is universal.