Cultural Intersection Quotes

What I try to do is defy expectations in terms of boundaries, whether it is high or low art, pop culture, or fine-art culture. My work is about reconciling myriad cultural influences and bringing them into one picture.

I loved this idea of always being a foreigner. There's this thing where people bring cultures, bring the music together. I love it when the music, when the cultures collide and something sort of new comes out of it.

'Elle' is such an iconic magazine, and the intersection of fashion and music has always been something that fascinates me.

I live between two things-I live between art and pop all the time.

After two decades of reconstruction work, I want to work on projects that lay at the intersection of cultural diplomacy and national identity - ones that empower local communities to define progress, not have it sanctioned by others.

To fully understand the black immigrant experience in the U.S., we must understand it not in contrast to the African-American experience, but central to it.

Main Street, U.S.A. is America at the turn of the century--the crossroads of an era. The gas lamps and the electric lamp--the horse-drawn car and auto car. Main Street is everyone's hometown- the heart line of America.

Many countries had a hand in raising me. I am the product of many contradicting philosophies and cultures... My entire universe is comprised of these foreign traditions. If any one of these experiences are to be ignored, I wouldn't be the same.

I think the merging of high and low culture is so fascinating.

I've always felt very much from a mixed culture - mainly English and French, but also Nigerian, Thai, Mexican. Everything's had its influence on me.

Enoch...why are you here? Why has my spirit been incarnated into a physical bodi in this world generally? Or specifically, why am I here in a Swedish forest, standing on the wreck of a mysterious German rocket plane while a homosexual German sobs over the cremated remains of his Italian lover?

I feel like I've mixed my Middle Eastern and Western loves together.

The Indian cowboy is such a uniquely American contradiction.

Living through the intersections of cultural diversity has given me an intimate understanding of the dynamics of living between the dimensions of East and West, traditional and modern, and political and spiritual.

As I stand here today and tell you about these, I am heavy with an awareness of the fact that I am in more than one sense a product of both the Chinese and Western cultures, in harmony and in conflict.

It seemed [there are] musical nodes on the planet where cultures meet and mix, sometimes as a result of unfortunate circumstances, like slavery or something else, in places like New Orleans and Havana and Brazil. And those are places where the European culture and indigenous culture and African culture all met and lived together, and some new kind of culture and especially music came out of that.

I have a bit two overlapping personalities. I have my African half that gives me the hot blood and the warmth and the exuberance, and then I have my French side, which is quite a bit more reserved. It's not always easy to reconcile the two.

I like the nexus of Bollywood and Hollywood. I'm actually shocked that there isn't more of a meld between our two industries.

One thing that I always liked about fashion was that it was tied in with music and art and film.

In a lot of ways, I wouldn't be an artist in another time. I need to exist in a time where high and low art mix easily.

What I've always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characters, and also my own, intersect with the public life of the culture.

When I arrived in Beirut from Europe, I felt the oppressive, damp heat, saw the unkempt palm trees and smelt the Arabic coffee, the fruit stalls and the over-spiced meat. It was the beginning of the Orient. And when I flew back to Beirut from Iran, I could pick up the British papers, ask for a gin and tonic at any bar, choose a French, Italian, or German restaurant for dinner. It was the beginning of the West. All things to all people, the Lebanese rarely questioned their own identity.

If you know two cultures and two languages, that intermediate place, where the two don't perfectly meet, is really interesting.

In some ways I consider myself more Chinese, because I live in San Francisco, which is becoming a predominantly Asian city. I avoid falling into the black-and-white dialectic in which most of America still seems trapped. I have always recognized that, as an American, I am in relationship with other parts of the world; that I have to measure myself against the Pacific, against Asia. Having to think of myself in relationship to that horizon has liberated me from the black-and-white checkerboard.

Maybe if they all could he combined - art, rock and fashion. Those were always my favorite things.