Paul Bowles Quotes

You experience other cultures to give you a kind of shock that makes you look at your own culture. You appreciate it more as a result of being out of it, but you also realise there are some things lacking in your culture.

I find it really liberating to be in a place where I am a foreigner in every way. I've lived with this all my life - this divide, this bifurcation. And in Italy, I don't feel it. There's none of that tension, only the expectation I place on myself to speak the language well. I find it relaxing. Something drops away, and I observe.

I think, something that you might be able to locate in the work that I'm creating today: the ability to look at a black America as something that not only can be mined in a very sort of cynical, cold way, but also embraced in a very personal, love-driven way; but also sort of critiqued.

I was interested in immigration and I wanted to use that in the film, not necessarily to talk about immigrants, although I wanted to do that, but to talk about ourselves through the eyes of an immigrant. The film takes place in the school and it tells us a little bit about who we are and where we're at, but through the eyes of someone who has a different background.

To try and to pretend that there's no difference between where we come from is so dumb.

We should wake up and tell ourselves: You're not a xenophobe, you're not a racist, you're not a crazy guy if you say, 'My culture is better than yours.'

It's been a good thing for me to try and understand America.

I don't relate to what is seen as 'Arab culture.' I relate to what I explore myself, what is around me.

With 'J', at a deep base level, there is still some comedy, but that masculinist voice that had driven so many of my novels I suddenly did not want to occupy. I wasn't reneging on it; I just didn't want to do it.

Colombian culture has had a huge influence on me and taught me a different way of looking at things - I was always different from the people I went to school with, and I learned to embrace that.

I didn't set out to be a Trump impressionist at all. It wasn't that I wanted to be Trump. It's that I was asking, 'What if Trump was me?'

In Japan, violence isn't as controversial as it is in the West.

'The Daily Show' forced me out of my comfort zone.

American and French culture are really, really different, but in a way it's funny.

I feel like it has been a journey throughout the years to be accepting of my culture - I always felt different and not as accepting of it.

I personally am going to look for stuff that interests me and either has very little to do or has the right thing to do with my ethnicity.

It wasn't a conscious decision to search for my Asian self; it was an urgency born out of an emptiness I was trying to fill.

While the books I read as a child lacked diversity in the strict sense, they didn't lack values. Reading, I didn't see me externally, but I felt me - my humanity.

I grew up in a household where we talked about race all the time, and that's sort of in me. So if I become the Anthony Bourdain of race and culture, then great!

I'm in the middle of an existential crisis in how I approach comedy about these big issues. I sometimes find, when I get drawn on the subject of race, it's too close to home for me and I can't articulate what I'm trying to get across.

In a strange way, we go to a play to be entertained, but if there is any kind of identification, we either reaffirm our beliefs, or we change.

My half-breed culture informs everything I do but I'm not thinking about it. I'm just doing it. Not until very late in my career did I realize that I was so fortunate to just live with this profound pride in being half Mexican without being attacked for it.

I do think that Americans do not understand that things are done differently in other parts of the world and that the other ways people do things are equally accurate ways to do things. Someone else just came up with something different.

To travel is to discover that everybody is wrong. The philosophies, the civilizations which seem, at a distance, so superior to those current at home, all prove on a close inspection to be in their own way just as hopelessly imperfect.

You are an ignorant schoolgirl. You think civilization is a good thing.