Cross-Cultural Perspectives Quotes

There's a big difference between how the Anglo-Saxon world views India, or viewed India, and the way Europe views India.

The fact is, I'm half-British, half-Malaysian. For an Asian who's grown up in America to be commenting on how Asian I am when they've never left America... does that make them more or less Asian than me?

The writer, Ruth Jhabvala, livedin India but was German. My partner Ismail Merchant was from Bombay but was educated in England and he had a different view on the world. Probably they had to contend with some sort of Oregonian-ness in me that they didn't understand and didn't know where it was coming from.

Exposure to fields like design to technology and from art to psychology gave me a quite nice/interesting viewpoint to the world.

My wife is French, and so I get to see America through her eyes, which informs a lot of little moments. It means I can poke fun at very particular things about us.

There's no lack of writers writing novels in America, about America. Therefore, it seems to me it would be wasteful for me to add to that huge number of people writing here when there are so few people writing about somewhere else.

I've had a Japanese judge, a Mexican judge in the past, and they have done some ridiculous scoring.

Growing up in Malaysia, there wasn't really a problem with representation. We saw faces like ours on screen because Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, China and Hong Kong all have their own film markets. It was only until I went back to the U.K. when I realized, 'Where did all these faces go?'

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.

Each of my novels has come from a different place, and the processes are not always entirely conscious. I have lived off and on in America for a number of years and so have accumulated observations, found things interesting, been moved to tell stories about them.

One of the aims of higher education is to broaden perspectives, and what better way than by a home stay in a really different country, like Bangladesh or Senegal? Time abroad also leaves one more aware of the complex prism of suspicion through which the United States is often viewed.

In lighthearted countries, people joked about this phenomenon, but such serious, practical countries as England, America, and Germany were deeply concerned.

I read mostly Irish, African, Japanese, South American, and African writers. You can count on Scandinavian literature for a certain kind of darkness, a modern mythic style.

"They order," said I, "this matter better in France."

I just feel that the East and the West are two different worlds. I sometimes get saddened when I see that very few writers of color are published or reviewed in East Coast presses and magazines.

When I tell my American counterparts that my budget was $200,000 per episode, they burst out laughing. To us that's a big production, to them it's a guerrilla shoot.

When you have an American mother from the Midwest and an Egyptian father, you travel back and forth and see such completely different stories in the news about the exact same events. It makes you think, 'How is anybody able to understand or even have a dialogue when the basis of information is just so completely different?'

One of the things that I have my students do is to take a look at English-language newspapers from all around the world in order to see the different ways in which the same story might be told.

A lot of great medicines and ancient therapies are blocked by the FDA, so that's why I choose to travel and recognize the value of diverse points of view in medicine.

Being from the Middle East paired with my upbringing in the United States had pretty polarising effects on the way I perceive beauty.

He showed the words “chocolate cake” to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. “Guilt” was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of French eaters to the same prompt: “celebration.