Cultural Exposure Quotes

A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.

I now realize that I was very fortunate to have grown up in many different places, surrounded by all kinds of people, all kinds of points of view.

Only after coming to Chennai did I come to know that I know nothing about music. People in Chennai are so talented in Carnatic, ghazals, etc. They can play Piano, etc so well.

My family was never cultural in that we never went to see plays, my mum wasn't very into films.

I've been to India, and I never thought I'd go there.

I grew up in Des Moines. My dad had a house full of books, things like P.G. Wodehouse books and 'Wuthering Heights' by Emily Bronte.

I do take for granted, probably, the fact that I grew up in New York City, one of the most liberal places on earth, with bleeding-heart, liberal parents who took me to see 'Rent' and Terrence McNally plays from a very young age.

Obviously the music I listened to growing up helped create my musical pallet. My parents were into pop, soul, disco, RNB, Latin, jazz and Middle Eastern music.

I was fortunate to live for 3 years in another country, and although we lived in an American compound, still as a young adolescent I did venture into the world of the Japanese with great interest and enjoyment. But many Americans never left that safe and familiar life among their own people.

I didn't see any Broadway till I was in my late twenties.

Nothing tends so much to enlarge the mind as traveling.

By seeing London, I have seen as much of life as the world can show.

I want to urge you very strongly to travel as much as you can, and to evolve yourself as an internationalist. It's as important a part of your education as a radical as the reading of any book.

I suppose I do the Japanese because I just don't know China. Chinese popular culture has never evoked that instant of, "Whoah! What's that?" that I have with Japanese popular culture.

I've been traveling the world and experiencing different places, and you always discover new things.

Coming to Pakistan has been unbelievable. It is the best thing of my career.

For me, I was born in the Bronx, and I moved to Virginia Beach, Virginia at a very young age. I had the luxury of going back to New York, visiting my grandmother who would spoil me endlessly, and I could buy whatever was the hot kicks in the summertime of 1990. Being able to shop and then going back to Virginia Beach, where they weren't as fast in regards to fashion, I had that luxury.

As a kid, I was listening to Aretha Franklin, Etta James and hip-hop as well as music my parents were listening to, like Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen.

I first came to China as a child on a visit with my family in 1978.

I didn't come from a background of films. I didn't even really ever watch films. The fact is, my parents weren't into that stuff, and neither was I.

Some of white middle America haven't seen a black gay guy in a music video before.

I was inadvertently raised in the 'gay community.' I had straight parents, but I spent massive amounts of time at a very early age with gay, theater-hopeful thirty-somethings.

My parents, who were split up, were so good at keeping my environment strong and keeping everything around me not focused on the fact that we were poor. They got me culture. They took me to museums. They showed art to me. They read to me. And my mother drove two hours a day to take me to University Elementary School.

All the privileged can travel, see different worlds; not everyone can. I think it is important for people to have an interesting locale nearby.

I went to hockey camp at Michigan because my dad has some relatives in the Ann Arbor area. We went to visit them as kids, and you start to learn the language from being around people. At the same time, when I got to college, I thought my English was better than it really was. I learned a lot over my four years.