Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Quotes

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

I'm obsessed with all things Bengali, man. I love fish, my maid is Bengali, I acted in Bengali and Bangladeshi films.

I am a Bengali, I like my rice.

I'd say, in some ways, I'm very Bengali. I have a love of the arts - dance, music, visual arts - which I think is a very Bengali trait. I also love food, which I know is very Bengali!

Stories serve the purpose of consolidating whatever gains people or their leaders have made or imagine they have made in their existing journey thorough the world.

But what I'm very interested in, whether it's writing, whether it's hosting a show, whether it's cooking food, I'm just into the discussions of identity, culture and the politics of culture.

So often, literature about African people is conflated with literature about African politics, as if the state were somehow of greater import or interest than the individual.

Art has to be reflective of our society.

It's not worth it, it's not about money, especially when you're dealing with a culture. It should be about elevating the idea of what we are and who we are as people in the cinema, and that kind of stuff keeps dragging us back down.

I don't think my work does reflect my nationality - I don't like the idea of nationalism.

A people's literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can.

What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible.

A country, a style or an epoch are interesting only for the idea behind them.

People have to identify with their own stories, with their own lives, so a movie belongs to a country and to a culture. Sometimes we can share, but it's very rare.

Movies can tell us about our place, or lack of place, in our culture.

Film is our literature, so we should tell stories that are apropos of our culture, in that we can learn something about ourselves.

For most Americans, my Chinese music feels like a novelty, and it's not what it is for me.

Without knowing the language of a people, we never really know their thoughts, their feelings, and their type of character.

Language allows one to crack the code of culture

At some point, you realize you can't provide a perfectly monolithic description of a foreign culture's future any more than you can provide a monolithic description of your own hometown's future. Your choices about what to emphasize and what to leave out make all the difference, and ultimately, your fingerprints and biases and viewpoints are going to be all over the story.

It is difficult to express the reality of Ibo society in classical English.

People ask me why my figures have to be so black. There are a lot of reasons. First, the blackness is a rhetorical device. When we talk about ourselves as a people and as a culture, we talk about black history, black culture, black music. That's the rhetorical position we occupy.

My blood is Indian. I don't need tablas in my music to prove that.

Telling diverse stories is at the heart of our culture.

I think that my films are westerns only in their exterior aspects. Within them are some of my truths, which happily, I see, belong to lots of parts of the world. Not just America.