Not being white has never prevented me from enjoying Luke Skywalker or Han Solo. These are heroes of mine.
USAGE, n. The First Person of the literary Trinity, the Second and Third being Custom and Conventionality. Imbued with a decent reverence for this Holy Triad an industrious writer may hope to produce books that will live as long as the fashion.
Art can contextualise and buttress fame. So rather than being antagonistic in the way Fugazi would have had it in 1989, particularly in the present, maybe they are one - they belong to one another.
If you consider yourself a part of the culture, then finances can't allow you to be bigger than the actual art form.
Being a part of 'Sex and the City' was like being at the center of the universe - it was extraordinary.
Forget about musical credibility. I think, unless you're Radiohead or whatever, it's pointless striving for that. What I would like is some respect.
The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would surprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car.
Popularity's a weird thing. You can't really define it, and it's not cool to talk about, but you know it when you see it. Like a lazy eye, or porn.
Like books and black lives - albums still matter. Tonight and always.
I certainly never imagined 80-year-olds singing along, like they were watching Cats. I'm fascinated by that kind of pop cultural zeitgeist that it's attached itself to.
I realized how far-reaching the effect of hip hop was when I walked by a jewelry store named Bling in a small, rural town in France. Hip hop has made a huge impact on urban culture. Yet many brands still don't speak to young people in a tone and manner that's representative of them.
You were able to sing something they related to instantly, because it was part of what you felt. It was part of what you had already traveled through. It's part of the people you were associating with daily. It was all of that.
That was something that I learned from Alan Ball from “Six Feet Under." He didn”t really like to have too many pop culture references because they don”t really hold up after a few years.
I think I'm so old I'm in. We call it the 'Tony Bennett Syndrome.' For some reason, young people think I'm cool.
It's funny: We have so many shows and so many channels and so many things to occupy people as entertainment, especially with a show like 'Scandal,' which is clearly a hit, with a lot of heat around it - but every once in a while, people will say, 'What are you doing?' and I'll say 'Scandal,' and they'll have no idea what I'm talking about.
I'm reaching a huge audience. I'm doing what artists like Beyonce are doing in terms of selling out stadiums. The difference is my audience speaks Spanish.
When I make chairs, they have legs; they can go anywhere in the world. Interiors are a different responsibility. A house is a representation of where you are, and it has to be right for the place.
It's hard to make a cultural phenomenon every time.
When I left politics in the early Eighties and started writing and recording, my idea was that I could have an influence further down into other generations. That Natives could come into the culture through arts and music.
On 'The Simpsons,' I will say that we definitely like to comment on what's going on in the world, and we try to be funny. If we can figure out a way of being funny about it, then we've gone part of the way of accomplishing our task.
I never felt like 'I'm an underground dude' or 'I can only be hot in New York.'
I feel like you can't just have fashion for fashion's sake.
My life has included a study of Shakespeare and to me it's very natural, but I know that it's not always accessible to other people.
Everybody else was quoting 2Pac, and I was running around with Green Day in my Walkman. Racially speaking, I wasn't cool or appropriate for any group.
Our society and media have lost touch with the job of the artist. The job of the artist has been subordinated to the job of the record seller.
