Cultural Perception Quotes

I think the whole thing, boy band, it's a little bit of a dirty word. They say it's not a good thing to be in a boy band. We want to change that. We want to make the boy band cool. It's not just about dancing and dressing the same.

When people talk about South Africa, it's all about lions and elephants. But when we talk about India, we talk about tigers.

Going the bold way somehow has a very negative connotation in Bollywood.

I don't want to act like the witch trials all over New England were warranted, but when you live in a culture that believes something is real, it feels very real.

It's very easy for Australians living in big cities to either romanticise or demonise the situation in Aboriginal places - to kind of look at things through the 'noble innocents' prism or through the 'chronically dysfunctional' prism, and I suspect that is so often the case.

All great popular literature today one day will be seen as great literature and will no longer be seen as popular literature.

We get the impression through film and TV that Americans are violent gangsters with guns or upper-middle-class people in romcoms. I really liked the people. They were really warm. They could have been Brits. I mean that in the nicest possible way.

There's a real gun culture in the U.K., for those who don't know. It's very real.

Soviet moviegoers gazed enviously on the jalopy that took the Joads from Oklahoma to California. The message Russians took from 'The Grapes of Wrath': even the poorest capitalists have cars!

When the British-Malaysian photographer Ian Teh first worked in China, more than a decade ago, he rendered it as a nation of people in Technicolor.

I'm bicultural, and everyone sees me as a Latina, but in my head I see myself as both Latina and American.

Basically, there are two kinds of stereotypes out there in the world about America. There's America the Goliath - the big, powerful, bullying country that pushes its way around the world and gets its ways, pursues its own interests nakedly, irrespective of what others want. And the other stereotype is America, the land of opportunity, where everyone can go and do anything, be anything, make any dreams come true.

I've never met an American who wanted to build an empire.

I think the good Lord is a Yankee.

I've heard people say South Africans are arrogant, that they act no differently from their colonial masters. That needs to change. It's in your business interest as an entrepreneur to form meaningful partnerships. That's how you do well for your shareholders.

The important thing for me is that I try to understand the culture. Everything I thought I knew about the country was either through TV, music, movies or hopping in and out when I did shows. You can't just get the US through being in Miami, LA and New York. Middle America is the place to understand real America.

People think of Jews as the Woody Allen stereotype, the nebbishy kind of thing, but that's not the kind of Jews I know. I know plenty of Israelis and plenty of tough guys that are Jewish. So, I think it makes sense that Jews play metal.

The downside to defining everything Chinese as different than American is that all things Chinese then become exotic.

Comics were not something that as a young kid you could say you were into in Manchester, Missouri. Kids did not read comic books back then.

A different language is a different vision of life.

People are so confused about race and hip-hop that people didn't even consider the Beastie Boys one of the greatest rap groups of all time because they were white.

After a lifetime of world travel I've been fascinated that those in the third world don't have the same perception of reality that we do.

China is an old nation with a colourful history. Its booming economy has triggered an appetite and a curiosity around the world for its art and culture, one that continues to grow. I can, however, tell people that it is a show with no actor.

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.

People are always angry at America. They're absolutely certain that America either caused their problems or is deliberately not fixing their problems. But the anger is always directed at America and never at Americans.