Paolo Bacigalupi Quotes

The choice of a point of view is the initial act of a culture.

I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that time, they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still.

I'm not trying to explain other cultures, or to give a fair and balanced account of a country, or the top ten things you need to know. I'm not trying to spread world peace and understanding. I'm not an advocate or an activist or an educator or a journalist. I'm out there trying to tell stories the best I can.

You have to be respectful of pop culture, because people interpret it in the way they want.

Value the perspective of different cultures and recognize the cultural mores that underpin groups and appreciate why these are valued and important.

Some things are really sacred and important to other cultures, so you have to be aware, politically, about those things before you just adopt them.

It's always hard to talk about the culture that you are from, especially with Islam, it is a very sensitive subject and I don't want to be seen to be adding to the problems of Islam and the west.

At about the age of seven … I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather: how lovely it was that the sun had come out. This despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria; we didn’t have snow, we ate mangoes, and we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to.

Those of us forged in the crucibles of difference know that survival is not an academic skill.

This sort of thing may be tolerated by the French, but we are British, thank God.

China is a company of contradictions. Nothing is what it appears to be. We have to be extremely respectful when we go overseas.

Travelers never think that they are the foreigners

A culture is made — or destroyed — by its articulate voices.

I try to represent specific experiences of specific characters, and that's all I want to try to do. I don't ever try to think about representing a culture, because its impossible, and someone will fault you. And it just doesn't interest me.

I don't think culture is something you can describe.

To try and to pretend that there's no difference between where we come from is so dumb.

That's what I loved about 'Community' - we had one of the most diverse casts on TV, but we didn't emphasize culture. And yet, we also didn't run away from it.

It's important to tell the story you're telling in the right way, which might involve black people or people of whatever heritage or ethnicity - or it might not.

For so long, the world has viewed West Indian culture as semiliterate and backward, which it is not. In my work, I have tried to give that world an exposure so the world can better understand it.

I'm not very happy to be classified as another Japanese designer. There is no one characteristic that all Japanese designers have.

There's a kind of integrity to being an observer of a culture. I think Canadians have that privilege innately. We are, like, the observers of the American culture.

As long as I'm making something from my voice, from my perspective there will be Asian American content because I am the storyteller.

A lot of the time, because we don't have many Latinx scenarios on the landscape, not just in television or film and other media, we haven't gotten the chance to tell our story from our point of view.

There's the fine line between presenting your culture and learning about other cultures so it becomes global.

As a woman of colour, as a person who is a minority, I believe its important that other people know about my language and I don't necessarily have to explain. In the same way, when I read 19th-century literature and if I have to understand a Latin phrase or a French phrase, it is incumbent upon me to learn it.