Edward James Olmos Quotes

I don't have doctrinaire views about how we should relate to Asia. But novelists reflect the world they live in, and that world propels you, to some extent. I'm a creature of the British Empire, and of the period of transition from the Empire.

The 21st century will be quite unlike the preceding two centuries, in which power was located in Europe and the U.S., and the rest of the world consisted of mere supplicants and bit players.

Europe began as the relatively empty, uncivilized Wild West of Asia; then the Western Hemisphere became the Wild West of Europe. Now the sun has set in our West and risen once more in the East.

In the past, the U.S. was the centre of the world, where everything was happening. I think my stories have always sought to question this, maybe even criticise it.

My writing has been shaped by the three countries - Sri Lanka, the Philippines and England - I have lived in.

It will take a long time, and certainly the West will remain the dominant civilization well into the next century, but the decline is occurring.

I was born in Lebanon and emigrated to the U.S. and went back. I'd been raised in a French school in Beirut. Lebanon is a peculiar place, so bicultural it goes along with you. There is a Western influence, an Eastern influence. Most people are fluctuating between those identities.

I have been influenced in my thinking by both west and east.

Obama remains frozen in his father's time machine. His anti-colonialism is the anti-colonialism of Africa in the 1950s: state confiscation of land, confiscatory taxation, and so on. My anti-colonialism is the anti-colonialism of India in the 21st century.

America has always imported history.

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.

Did Algeria colonize France, or vice versa? Did Egypt colonize England, or vice versa? We [Arabs] are the victims...

When you start exporting ideas, philosophy, behavior, products, ways of living, it becomes an assault on the culture. Americans have to understand that.

The colonial powers especially the more heedless ones ... dumped their former possessions on the threshold of independence with little if any preparation for statehood.

We've all seen these projections of how society is going to look in 50 years. We're all going to have to deal with each other culturally.

I think there has been a long-running notion in the West that Asia was a continent of people that were really conquerable. That people from Asia were weak, they were small in all ways - including physically small, geopolitically small, economically small - all of which are changing, of course.

As well as our relationship with Afghanistan, I am researching the legacy of other European empires - in Africa. We think of those empires as history, but actually, they still haunt our everyday lives in the strangest of ways.

It would be wrong to see the re-making of Asia, much less India, as a revolt against the West. Asia has indeed been re-built on the ruins of colonialism, but not on the ruins of all that the West has come to represent.

'The Sound of Silk' will serve as a lens for larger questions about cultural identity in a global society and the potential for individuals to act as catalysts for change.

During the tour of 'Circulations,' we spent a lot of time in Canadian Chinatowns. I was fascinated by the idea that you can cross the road and enter this dream world, this vision of China.

I'm from Norway, but I always felt like I'd grown up with British culture.

If there is cultural imperialism, it is definitely American.

My dad was born in Haiti, and my mom was born in Tunisia. She is the daughter of a white French woman and a black, half-Guadeloupian, half-American man. My mom traveled the world a lot. She went through Africa, South America, and the Caribbean. She just got to experience a lot of different cultures, and that came through my childhood.

You can't be in business with international development and not understand basic issues of colonialism, postcolonialism and white privilege.

Britain has always been a nation with a strong global focus. We have influenced change and built strong ties all round the world.