David Sylvian Quotes

Two hundred or more years ago most people on the planet were never aware of any reality other than the one into which they were brought up.

Culture is a little like dropping an Alka-Seltzer into a glass - you don't see it, but somehow it does something.

It's trite to say that the world has gotten smaller in the age of globalization, but my travels have told me that it's wrong to think this means there is some kind of uniform world culture.

When you travel like I do, just within our own country the atmosphere is different. The environment is different; the way people talk is different. The energy is different. And that's just material-wise, with the local culture.

You can't escape culture. You can learn about it. You can criticize it. You can try to move it slowly. But at the end of the day, you can't actually opt out of the culture that you're in.

I've never left my culture. I've left my country, but I've not left my culture. In the same way, you shouldn't be worried why George Lucas is going to the outer galaxy to make a movie. He's still making a film within his culture; he's making an American film. I go to Thailand or the Peruvian jungle, the Amazon, and I still make Bavarian films.

Now, I know it's a widespread assumption in the West that as countries modernize, they also westernize. This is an illusion. It's an assumption that modernity is a product simply of competition, markets and technology. It is not. It is also shaped equally by history and culture. China is not like the West, and it will not become like the West.

My writing has been shaped by the three countries - Sri Lanka, the Philippines and England - I have lived in.

One thing that is not to be underestimated is American culture's influence on the rest of the world.

Over the past several years, all of us as Canadians, and as members of the North American cultural and economic environment, have been to a greater or lesser extent party to a significant attitudinal change towards our culture.

I'm married to an American, so I guess that has changed my perspective on the subjects I can write about.

I was born in Lebanon and emigrated to the U.S. and went back. I'd been raised in a French school in Beirut. Lebanon is a peculiar place, so bicultural it goes along with you. There is a Western influence, an Eastern influence. Most people are fluctuating between those identities.

It's because we are so flooded with American culture that we're startled when we see ourselves up there on the screen.

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

I don't think massification and globalization and all those other 'izations' are necessarily hostile to regionalism.

The cultural decoding that many American writers require has become an even harder task in the age of globalisation. The experience they describe has grown more private; its essential background, the busy larger world, has receded.

We also have a cultural phenomenon: the emergence of a global culture, or of cultural globalization.

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

Travelers never think that they are the foreigners

Each culture represents a harmonious balance of traditional conventions by means of which latent possibilities of human life can unfold themselves in a way which reveals to us new aspects of its unlimited richness and variety..

We see culture as a self-organising thing.

Internet as a service is like culture that you have to understand, and each country has a local culture.

When I went to Australia, I had this feeling, like, 'Wow, this is really a different country.' I think that feeling of genuine foreignness, that this is a very different culture, which is increasingly rare in our globalised world.

Yoga is not Indian; it does not belong to India.

I've been exposed to so many different cultures.