My roots are in Paris, and I will not pull them up.

Coffee is a language in itself.

Germany is a great nation only because its people have so much Polish blood in their veins.

I have visited Japan several times and have always been shown wonderful hospitality.

There can never be any stop to learn about different cultures by travelling to different places. And whatever comes your way, continue the healthy eating habits.

Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.

Y’all are so cute and y’all talk so proper over here. I love England.

A nation’s culture resides in the hearts and in the soul of its people.

I don’t have space to enter into the examples or the history of this, so I’m left with having to make the bold statement that culture is extinct.

In South Korea, they believe that when you turn 60, you’ve become a baby again and the rest of your life should be totally about joy and happiness, and people should leave you alone, and I just think that that’s the height of intelligence.

Since I have come to America, I am often asked whether my next novel will be set in America. I don’t think it will. I think I will be living in America for some time to come, but while living in America, I would like to write about Japanese society from the outside.

Above all, this country is our own. Nobody has to get up in the morning and worry what his neighbors think of him. Being a Jew is no problem here.

I never go anywhere. I do sketches and make phone calls, and people visit. It’s more fun to come to Paris.

Those who boast of their descent, brag on what they owe to others.

Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels – men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.

Culture makes people understand each other better. And if they understand each other better in their soul, it is easier to overcome the economic and political barriers. But first they have to understand that their neighbour is, in the end, just like them, with the same problems, the same questions.

Part of my ancestry is Cherokee. And in that tradition, you become an adult when you’re 52.

One of the powerful temptations is that of the cinema palace. The cinema has undoubtedly an enormous attraction for boys, and people are constantly cudgelling their brains how to stop it. But it is one of those things which would be very difficult to stop even if it were altogether desirable.

If I had remained in Lhasa, even without the Chinese occupation, I would probably have carried the ceremonial role in some orthodox way.

It’s important to love in hip hop.

So there’s no guarantee if you like the music you will empathize with the culture and the people who made it. It doesn’t necessarily happen. I think it can, but it doesn’t necessarily happen. Which is kind of a shame.

Some say our national pastime is baseball. Not me. It’s gossip.

‚WASP‘ is the only ethnic term that is in fact a term of class, apart from redneck, which is another word for the same group but who are in the lower social strata, so it’s inexplicably tied up with social standing and culture and history in a way that the other hyphenations just are not.

Food is everything we are. It’s an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It’s inseparable from those from the get-go.

I hate the rock music tradition. I can’t bear it!

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them. During slavery, who was able to read or write or keep anything? The ability to have somebody to tell your story to is so important. It says: ‚I was here. I may be sold tomorrow. But you know I was here.‘

Black people comprehend the South. We understand its weight. It has rested on our backs… I knew that my heart would break if ever I put my foot down on that soil, moist, still, with old hurts. I had to face the fear/loathing at its source or it would consume me whole.

Tradition is the illusion of permanence.

I don’t travel with them, but they can’t be missing in my home. There have to always be dominoes… I used to play with my family – dad, my grandpa, my uncles.

Civilization is the making of civil persons.

Piety is not a goal but a means to attain through the purest peace of mind the highest culture.

No culture can live if it attempts to be exclusive.

The equal right of all citizens to health, education, work, food, security, culture, science, and wellbeing – that is, the same rights we proclaimed when we began our struggle, in addition to those which emerge from our dreams of justice and equality for all inhabitants of our world – is what I wish for all.

Britishness is just a way of putting things together and a certain don’t care attitude about clothes. You don’t care, you just do it and it looks great.

Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families – second families, perhaps I should say.

India has 2,000,000 gods and worships them all. In religion, all other countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire.

You’re never going to kill storytelling, because it’s built into the human plan. We come with it.

The more people rationalize cheating, the more it becomes a culture of dishonesty. And that can become a vicious, downward cycle. Because suddenly, if everyone else is cheating, you feel a need to cheat, too.

There is a level of snobbery and fickleness in L.A.

I have moved to a smaller house in Paris, and I don’t fancy having so much staff now.

We just seem to have lost all our morals and principles and values these days.

Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as a heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors.

Many people in the western world are spoiled by the conveniences of our culture.

Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening.

Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence.

Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.

No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.

A great poet is the most precious jewel of a nation.

Some believe all that parents, tutors, and kindred believe. They take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them.

I love the natural world – it comes from my culture, which grew out of a people enslaved.

Our society strives to avoid any possibility of offending anyone – except God.

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

Honolulu is a melting pot.

Everybody is entertained to death.

Paris ain’t much of a town.

Thank God, I never was cheerful. I come from the happy stock of the Mathers, who, as you remember, passed sweet mornings reflecting on the goodness of God and the damnation of infants.

Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it – aliens.

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?

My connection with Brazil is so abstract. My blood and my way of thinking is Brazilian, but that’s it. I don’t tend to go back to the past, and although I have an apartment there, I rarely visit. When I move, I really move.