Paul Di Filippo Quotes

The real Mary Poppins got lost when Hollywood turned her into a cream puff.

The poetry and transgression that was so much of surrealism's anarchic force has been recruited into mainstream culture. It has been made commonplace by television and magazine merchandising, by computer games and Internet visuals, by film and MTV, by the fashion shoot.

I knew that there were black people in Africa, of course, unfortunately because of movies such as 'Tarzan.'

Sex and the City changed New York-New York's become a big shoe store now, unfortunately.

Pop culture is not about depth. It's about marketing, supply and demand, consumerism.

I don't dislike rappers or hip-hop or people who like it. I went to the Def Jam tour in Manchester in the '80s when rap was inspirational. Public Enemy were awesome. But it's all about status and bling now, and it doesn't say anything to me.

What we want is a social harmony, even as we live in a world where any idea about 'the real thing' is as likely to evoke the ancient memory of an advertisement for a soda pop as anything solid or necessary.

It's important to me that I don't get trapped in the whole teen scene, because I feel that you can get lost in those kind of movies, and they aren't really about the actors; they're about the selling of the concept, and how much money it makes.

My dad's quite a conservative person, and he brought me up to be very questioning of the commercial world. He looked down on pop culture. I definitely got the impression that pop was evil and that Britney Spears was evil.

A brand is a voice and a product is a souvenir.

Today brands are everything, and all kinds of products and services - from accounting firms to sneaker makers to restaurants - are figuring out how to transcend the narrow boundaries of their categories and become a brand surrounded by a Tommy Hilfiger-like buzz.

In a lot of movies, especially big studio ones, they're not constructed in any other way than to get people to like them and then tell their friends. It's a product.

I think TV is all about not turning off the public, it's about not being too sexy, not being too much of anything really.

The '60s are presented to kids today as a commodity.

Kmart's as much a part of my history as 'Charlie's Angels.' Twenty-five years! It's not just a celebrity brand.

But I think the image that's thrown out on television is a bad image. Because you see players who want to imitate hip-hop stars. And the NBA is taking advantage of the situation.

The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf.

Mass consumption, advertising, and mass art are a corporate Frankenstein; while they reinforce the system, they also undermine it.

Broadway purists may deplore the influx of movie-spinoff musicals in recent years, wishing someone would turn off the popcorn machine and let more imaginative brainstorms blow through.

Since I became part of the zeitgeist, I've been called a sellout many times.

Halloween is woke, and there's nothing we can do about it.

Just because we're on USA, we didn't necessarily have to be the USA brand.

Music became less understandable in the wake of the new MTV era. You weren't supposed to be anything other than a pop star, to not go deeper than that. It was really strange. It was suffocating, image-wise. What you could talk about in a song changed; if you were misunderstood, you were really misunderstood - taken literally.

The '90s was a decade of mundane market-consumer nothingness where there was nothing coming up from the streets; you just had someone in an office deciding what was cool.

If you watch any show that stars white people, white people aren't coming up to them like, 'Thank you for showing my face on the big screen.' Because they see their faces in popular culture all the time.