Edwidge Danticat Quotes

I kept on trying to use so many media and ideas in my work because our horizon is so vast and Indian culture is so rich that I think what we are today, culturally, we have a unique position and I don't think one lifetime is enough to encompass it.

We are taking our culture and suturing it to America. Like gum on the bottom of a shoe, we are not going to disappear. Unlike other peoples who totally assimilated, we are more interested in co-assimilation.

I think one can live in American society with a certain cultural heritage, whether it's an African heritage or other, European,what have you, and still absorb a great deal of this culture. There is always cultural assimilation.

Local color has a fatal tendency to remain local; but it is also true that the universal often borders on the void.

The mixture of the Trinidadian people and the Indian people has caused a new culture to emerge.

Rather than be asked to abandon one's own heritage and to adapt to the mores of the new country, one was expected to possess a treasure of foreign skills and customs that would enrich the resources of American living.

As I stand here today and tell you about these, I am heavy with an awareness of the fact that I am in more than one sense a product of both the Chinese and Western cultures, in harmony and in conflict.

The question was heatedly debated of how much Western culture should be brought into China.

The basic principle I have is that what is most Korean is what is the most international. I don't want to come here and act like I'm an American. I want to showcase the dynamic potential Korea has, and I want to prove that as an artist.

I've benefited from the best of both societies and both cultures, East and West.

I grew up having two different perspectives - one in English, one in Spanish. Two different cultures, very different - but I think that, to me, it's one. I'm just as American as I feel Latin.

China is important to the world in that they are a force and on the move. Exposing them to figurative art opens up a potential for artistic expression far greater than anyone would ever have dreamed possible until today. It is this very spirit of the struggle and determination to triumph that inspires creative expression.

So American culture is itself a hybrid and lends itself to use in other people's hybrids.

The culture of Greece is not the same as the culture of Germany, and to fuse them into a single unit is extremely difficult.

Can that make any sense - a Belgian artist living in Mexico and working in Afghanistan?

My work has been much more Caribbean and eclectic. I am interested in people, and where they come from happens to have fallen within an area of Africa.

I suppose I have become a sort of living monument in Portugal. But I come from a family with roots all over the world, so the idea of patriotism is not very strong in me. My country is the country of Chekhov, Beethoven, Velasquez - writers I like, painters and artists I admire.

I believe we have to bring Broadway a little Latino flair. We have to keep it alive.

Fact is, given a choice to erase or embrace Western popular culture, most Muslims would gleefully embrace it.

Two half-truths do not make a truth, and two half-cultures do not make a culture.

We are the Romans of the modern world—the great assimilating people.

They say that immigrants don’t speak English. So? Who cares. Even the Irish learned English after a while.

America is transplanted Europe, but a Europe that has not been disintegrated and scattered in the transplanting as in some Dispersion. Its colonies live here inextricably mingled, yet not homogeneous. They merge but they do not fuse.

I grew up in the States, but I go back to Brazil quite often, and a big part of me is very Brazilian, so there's a constant struggle between the two cultures within me. They're very different approaches to life.

Even if it's a wonderful life, you wanna go somewhere and see the way other people reflect on the world and the lives that we're all living... I think regional theater is the life blood of our cultural lives.