Wallace Stevens Quotes

We were a Western civilisation, an English speaking civilisation, both NZ and Australia, and we had all these influences coming from both Great Britain and America to us; sending us their culture in the shape and form of movies and television.

I don't have doctrinaire views about how we should relate to Asia. But novelists reflect the world they live in, and that world propels you, to some extent. I'm a creature of the British Empire, and of the period of transition from the Empire.

You'd never know it from reading the rest of the Native writers, but Indians actually grew up with American pop culture.

In Malaysia, where Western culture was extremely influential, I'd grown up listening to Elvis and the Beatles and watching American movies. People wanted to be like Americans. In contrast, when I got here, I saw prosperous middle-class American college students wanting to somehow join the Third World.

I'm more American than anything else. I grew up in China, but I was fulfilled at a young age by American music. It was my biggest inspiration.

I always feel like people misunderstand the difference between an Asian story and an Asian-American story. That's completely different, too. I have friends who grew up in Asia, and our experiences are so different. Even though we might look the same, I feel like being Asian and then being Asian-American is completely different.

When I've seen my operas in Europe, they have always struck me as more American than when I hear them here. I can't tell you what that phenomenon is.

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

I wanted to write a story about colonization and about Hawaii. I went to college right at the height of identity politics, and that's how I always read 'The Tempest,' for example.

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

American literature has always been immigrant.

Like all of Latin America, Mexico after independence in 1821 turned its back on a triple heritage: on the Spanish heritage, because we were newly liberated colonies, and on our Indian and black heritages, because we considered them backward and barbaric. We looked towards France, England and the U.S., to become progressive democratic republics.

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

You have the United States, and you have Mexico, and then you have this Mexican-American thing which is this third culture, which I like to call Aztlan.

I struggled with being a Latino growing up in Los Angeles. I felt very American. I still do. I went to 35 bar mitzvahs before I went to a single quinceanera. I could talk all day about my culture and what it means to me.

Mexico is so close to us. No matter how long we stay here, we identify as Americans first, but we also have a place for our mother country. That is very visible in San Antonio.

When you start exporting ideas, philosophy, behavior, products, ways of living, it becomes an assault on the culture. Americans have to understand that.

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.

I'm a first-generation kid in this country. I so identify with America and its culture. I'm a citizen, I was born here. I'm American. At the same time, like most first-generation kids, I have this other identity to another country back home, which is India.

American histories were the same; they had these mad ideas about how Parliament worked, or what people really meant when they said A, B, or C. All my life, I felt simultaneously deracinated and rooted in both places, and now it's my greatest strength: I'm culturally bilingual.

I am not afraid of European influences. The point is to use them, as Ellington did, as part of my life as an American Negro.

I've grown up surrounded by Americans and to a very large extent feel American. It sounds strange because I seem to be so quintessentially English in everyone's mind - and perhaps I am. Perhaps it's quintessentially English to have a fascination with America.

I'm from Norway, but I always felt like I'd grown up with British culture.

If there is cultural imperialism, it is definitely American.

From jazz, the blues, country and rock to Hollywood movies, culture has in many ways been our greatest export (or our most obnoxious one, depending on your point of view).