Julie Salamon Quotes

You're not just this person who's from your own specific experiences, but the collective experience of what makes you who you are because of time.

Customary though it may be to write about that institutionalized pastime as though it existed apart from the general environment, my story does not lend itself to such treatment.

I think character is very much a product of where you live, who you are, what is happening in that time of your life, and I'm interested in those pressures, those forces. A political context, a social context, really determines if not who people are then how they treat one another and what they say, how they speak.

Of necessity, the autobiographical self is not just about one individual but about all the others that an individual interacts with. Of necessity, it incorporates the culture in which the interactions took place.

History does influence our lives - every moment. We never sort of live our lives in a linear fashion. We always have these memories and these images from our past that sometimes we're not even aware of, and they sort of shape who we are.

I suppose it's fair to say that I am interested in the invention of self or selves. We're all born into certain circumstances with particular physical traits, unique developmental experiences, geographical and historical contexts.

Everybody's past and history informs them.

How can I expect readers to know who I am if I do not tell them about my family, my friends, the relationships in my life? Who am I if not where I fit in the world, where I fit in the lives of the people dear to me?

Can we ignore what is going on around us, can we disconnect ourselves, our own material situation, our spiritual selves, who we are, can we disconnect that from history and the social context of our lives? The older I get, the more I'm convinced that we cannot, that we are social creatures.

It is always interesting and sometimes even important to have intimate knowledge of a composer's life, but it is not essential in order to understand the composer's works.

A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.

Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society and state in which we live.

History is present in all my novels. And whether I am directly talking about the sociological moment or just immersing my character in the environment, I am very aware of it.

We are not makers of history. We are made by history.

I began to feel that, in a sense, we were all prisoners of our own history.

You can only judge anything that happened in the times, in the times that that happened.

I've always been interested in the relationship between total external surround, culture, the political matrix, technology, etc., and the internal human consciousness.

I find it endlessly interesting, endlessly funny, the fact that we're rather arbitrarily divided up into these discrete humans and that your physical self, your physical attributes, your moment of history and the place where you were born determine who you are as much as all that indefinable stuff that's inside of you.

Your background and environment is with you for life. No question about that.

Most social acts have to be understood in their setting and lose meaning if isolated... No error in thinking about social facts is more serious than the failure to see their place and function.

To be human is to have a collection of memories that tells you who you are and how you got there.

Each generation of adolescents has at least two historical events that color its responses to whatever happens next.

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've tried to write from my own understanding of identity in all my comics, whether it's about superheroes or historical conflicts or monkey gods.

A poem I write is not just about me; it is about national identity, not just regional but national, the history of people in relation to other people. I reach for these outward stories to make sense of my own life, and how my story intersects with a larger public history.