Lawrence Durrell Quotes

I love California. It has such a strong contribution to the history of culture, and popular culture. For better and worse, of course. Even the worst can be interesting to some degree sometimes for somebody creative.

I love how pop culture shapes a generation. The trends, fashion and events all play a key part in how we live our present lives, and will mark how we will be remembered in the future.

Songs are funny things. They can slip across borders. Proliferate in prisons. Penetrate hard shells. I always believed that the right song at the right moment could change history.

Asked to make a list of the men who have most dominated the thinking of the modern world, many educated people would name Freud, Einstein, Marx and Darwin. Of these four, only Darwin was not Jewish. In a world where Jews are only a tiny percentage of the population, what is the secret of the disproportionate importance the Jews have had in the history of Western culture?

Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen.

I want to affect culture. I want to have my mark on everything. I give examples of people like Bill Cosby, Quincy Jones - those are the people who I look up to. The game wouldn't be the same without them. What happens in the course of 5 years isn't really important to me. I care about what they'll say about me in 50 years.

Whatever rappers wear is cool to people.

It's fun to be a part of pop history. Anytime you can be referenced in that respect it can be cool.

I think that every time you bring a subject into the mainstream landscape of television, it can have a huge impact. Television is such an influential medium.

Because for me, '60s pop music is amongst the most complicated or complex music because it has so many resonances which strike you. The music itself is often simple, but the way that I interpret it, or the way I think it's interpreted culturally, is very complex.

I had the good fortune to be able to take a course with Margaret Mead. I had a fabulous art course, where it was explained to me that nothing exists in a vacuum, that everything is a result of the period in which it's done - the economics, the sociology, the politics, all sewn together. That was a very important lesson.

I simply wanted to state that during this little slice of history, this is what happened and these were the good sides of it, these were the more dangerous sides of it, and this was the result.

Surely every band wants to be a pivotal point in history.

I make movies for me and posterity. I'm more scared of history than I am of the studio.

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

History is simply a piece of paper covered with print; the main thing is still to make history, not to write it.

Among the earliest modern commodities were printed books … and their shrinking price and increased availability were far more historically momentous than, say, the spread of the internal combustion engine.

Gold is special, and what makes it special is thousands of years of people wanting it..

Our leaders have to stop ignoring the impact that culture is having on our nation.

The dresses I wore are in the Smithsonian now.

Fashion has always had the ability to affect lives, to touch people. But for the longest period of time, we've said, 'Oh, we're just pages of a magazine; that's what we all look at.' It's more than that.

Part of the reason everyone is freaking out over 'Black Panther' is because we've never seen it. We have two thousand years of stories, and we've never seen it.

It's my responsibility as an artist and public figure to put the right frequency out there.

I love and I'm intrigued by what history does to people and to subjects that matter.

Being a part of 'Hamilton' is remarkably special. It's a very powerful show that has spectacular emotional and political relevance.