I've thought for years, sometimes against my will, about what kind of son I'm supposed to be, what's expected. Being Korean, that's a particularly charged question. Is your duty to your culture or to your parent? Is your life your own, or the second half of your parents' life? Who owns your life?
The hero, the mythical subject, is constructed as human being and as male; he is the active principle of culture, the establisher of distinction, the creator of differences.
When it comes to best new artist or album or song of the year, yeah, it's very rare that you see someone in country win one of those. It's a very strong genre, and it's got roots so deep in our culture. I think the pool of voters listen more to pop and R&B and hip-hop. Those seem to be the major contenders.
Horizontal and vertical sprawl... are the dinosaurs of an ending fossil-fuel age of synthetic culture.
I think this whole division between the genres has more to do with marketing than anything else. It's terrible for the culture of music.
I do make some conscious efforts to write female friendships, intergenerational female friendships. I make a conscious effort to include things that I see as important real parts of my life that are not reflected as much as I think they should be in popular culture. We very seldom have the opportunity to see women compete and remain friends.
I've often used the extremes in my work to comment on the mainstream. I think that sometimes a subject that I'm working on, like popular culture, is so present all around us that they're hard to see. It's like: How do you see the air you breathe? How do you see how it affects you?
South Africa is the only place in the Southern hemisphere where Halloween is really catching on. They have a lot of sporting events that have made it more popular there. They have motocross and rave celebrations, and they're embracing it as a youth culture thing.
When it comes to engaging and influencing culture, too many Christians think too highly of political activism.
My parents weren't artistic, but I was always surrounded by beautiful things. And Mexico is a country which has experienced thousands of years of art and culture.
Fashion is just an interpretation of the culture around us.
My name, Solange, means 'Angel of the sun,' and I'm completely enamored of my African history. The culture is so expressive.
As long as we are engaged in storytelling that moves the culture forward, it doesn't matter what format it is.
Culture is not a biologically transmitted complex.
In Buddhist culture, offering food to the monk symbolizes the action of goodness, and if you have no opportunity to support the practice of spirituality, then you are somehow left in the realm of darkness.
That's something the head scarf, in a symbolic way, is meant to do in Arabic culture: it defines your relationship to your husband and the men of your family differently than your relationship to the average guy on the street you've never met.
Black culture is something I don't relate to much at all.
For the first time in human evolution, the individual life is long enough, and the cultural transformation swift enough, that the individual mind is now a constituent player in the global transformation of human culture.
With a movie you're creating from the beginning this particular work, let's not call it work of art, because very few movies are works of art, let's just call them bits of popular culture, whatever they are, sometimes very rarely by accident a movie becomes a work of art.
I say to my industrialist friends, when you have guests from out of town, I don't care how important they are, you should feed them the essence of Italian culture: spaghetti, bread and olive oil.
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.
Our culture is more shaped by the arts and humanities than it often is by politics.
I respect the British a lot - their history, their past, their culture. I think it's beautiful, what they have with the monarchy.
At times in my life, I have been utterly lonely. At other times, I've had disgusting infectious diseases. Try admitting these things in our culture.
Any architectural project we do takes at least four or five years, so increasingly there is a discrepancy between the acceleration of culture and the continuing slowness of architecture.
In my culture, there's a tradition that when you're in an overwhelming situation and you don't know what to do, you put yourself in a woman's shoes.
Saturday night at my house, I often trot out classic movies and force the urchins to watch them. There is much wailing and gnashing of teeth, but I think it's important to teach kids about American culture, and films are certainly a big part of it.
In India, you see the way they embrace color in the culture - it's very celebratory of the existence of color. There's no rule of what color belongs together or doesn't belong together. They're not precious about it. It's very full-on.
Youth culture now really looks back and embraces the past, but keeps it contemporary but not sticking to one particular style.
The one place where I do think our culture today has to be extremely careful is this whole thing about illegal aliens. Because any time you start defining a significant block of the population as 'others,' or as less than you, you start getting into dangerous waters.
Statistically, Portland, Oregon has the most street kids, like kids that run away from home and live on the street. It's like a whole culture thing there. If you walk around on the streets, there are kids living on the streets, begging for money, but it's almost like a cool thing. They all just sit around and play music and squat.
Food is a lens for culture.
American movies are often very good at mining those great underlying myths that make films robustly travel across class, age, gender, culture.
Dick Clark's 'American Bandstand' spread the gospel of American pop music and teenage style that transcended the regional boundaries of our country and united a youth culture that eventually spread its message throughout the entire world.
In most places that are rich in guitar culture, everyone uses their fingers, like in Spain or Africa. In Japan there are string instruments played that way. It is not until you get in the States that you find people using picks.
It's still amazing, but when I was growing up, Harlem was the Mecca of black culture. I was so inspired by it, the aspirational feeling you'd get spending time there. Experiences that were really specific to that place.