Travelling childhoods are a common theme among actors. Army kids, embassy kids, travelling salesmen, clergy. Thing is, you learn about behaviour, that different places are separated by behaviours which are culturally driven.
We live in a world of diverse cultures, and we know very little about social engineering and how to 'build nations.' And when we cannot be sure how to improve the world, hubristic visions pose a grave danger.
India brings out so many different feelings in me. I've been fascinated with India and Indian culture as long as I can remember - ever since the '60s with the Beatles and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
Why do we cling to bigotry? Because bigotry, plainly, is convenient. It is a near-effortless way to both elevate one's stature and make a pity grab in this culture of victims that we have become.
My mother is not a woman of ordinary culture. She knows literature and speaks Spanish better than I do. She even corrected my poems and gave me advice when I was studying rhetoric.
In a shooting day in the U.K., every few hours, everyone takes a bit of a tea break - not coffee, but a tea break. They bring out these little finger sandwiches with the crust cut off. Everyone sits around for a few minutes, with their pinkies in the...
As for the historical inspirations I drew on in writing The Snow Queen, I suppose I would call them more cross-cultural inspirations, though they frequently involve past societies as well as present day ones.
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.
People from all over the world were killed in the attacks on the World Trade Centre. They came from many different cultural, ethnic and religious backgrounds. Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Hindu believers were killed together as they worked in the to...
Suppose we were able to share meanings freely without a compulsive urge to impose our view or conform to those of others and without distortion and self-deception. Would this not constitute a real revolution in culture.
In Britain, we've tended to replace the kind of architectural culture valued in much of Europe with an in-flight magazine lifestyle - all branding, marketing and 'accessibility', a word that usually means dumbing-down.
One of the most stubborn barriers to patient empowerment is the cultural assumption that since the way professionals learned was hard, you must need to be really smart, and you need to be taught in a carefully thought out, methodical sequence.
My new play 'Chinglish,' which will go to Broadway, is about a white American businessman who goes to a provincial capital in China, hoping to make a deal there. It's bilingual. And it's about trying to communicate across language and cultural barrie...
I feel like Africans are too often portrayed as people on the National Geographic channel: the image is of an African man in a loincloth chasing a gazelle. It's not intentionally racist; I wouldn't call it racist at all. It's a lack of understanding ...
My audience consists mainly of people who already recognize how bad this culture is, and I want to push them to become more radical. It doesn't really matter to me if they are Left or Right.
Well, I don't think anyone now would say that they're painting the state of the culture of America. I think that's too grand and pompous a thing for anybody to claim.
The Guy Fawkes mask has now become a common brand and a convenient placard to use in protest against tyranny - and I'm happy with people using it; it seems quite unique, an icon of popular culture being used this way.
Each culture has its own form of staged combat, evolved from its particular method of street fighting and cleaned up for presentation as a spectacle, e.g. savate, Cornish wrestling, karate, kung-fu.
What is the big political issue for Britain at the moment? Without wishing to sound portentous, it is about whether we can build a social democratic settlement, whether we can lay the political and cultural foundations for the next several years.
If one religion were 'true,' we would expect to see, even if only once in all of recorded history, a religious missionary that had stumbled upon a culture that shared the same revelations — brought forth by the same deity.
Children go from being a kind of cultural protectorate to the Junior Auxiliary of the tube-watching nation at large, and programs are designed for them on the same principle as they're designed for grown-ups: as a way to sell eyeballs to advertisers.
