Wim Wenders Quotes

While 'Babel' is a foreign-language film in some countries, in others, it is a local film.

I am constantly swimming on the margin, neither 100% American, French, nor Lebanese. I am none of those. I am the result of those three. Sometimes it's an asset: no one can put you in a category. That I do not make typical Lebanese, European or American films does not bother me.

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

I've always felt very much from a mixed culture - mainly English and French, but also Nigerian, Thai, Mexican. Everything's had its influence on me.

I don't think you lose culture because you act different cultures.

My family is a Jewish Iranian family, but I was born in Turkey and raised in Italy. So it's a very mixed background.

My head is in India, yet my body remains in Britain. I straddle the world like a colossus. Like a 5ft. 7in. colossus.

All of a sudden, there are great Japanese films, or great Italian films, or great Australian films. It's usually because there are a number of people that cross-pollinated each other.

The American movie, in part because America's a melting pot, the cultural hodgepodge that America makes, generates movies that have appeal across all international boundaries. And that's really not true for most domestic film industries. It's no longer true of France and Italy, less true than it used to be of the U.K.

I have a variety of readers from across the diasporic community, not just from South Asia. I like to write large stories that include all of us - about common and cohesive experiences which bring together many immigrants, their culture shocks, transformations, concepts of home and self in a new land.

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.

As a cultural product of both 'East' and 'West', I do not believe there is a fundamental basis for a clash of civilisations, or that the West is the cause of all problems.

Everyone is so estranged; no one is rooted. That's what I like to write about more than anything else. Everything being so mixed up. Racially mixed up, people moving from place to place, everything shifting.

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.

More and more, cultural groups are cross-pollinating, and we're getting much more interesting art as a result.

So many people are of mixed heritage; everyone is from somewhere else.

I'm getting a little bored by the juxtaposition of American and other cinema. I no longer think this division is as true as it might have been in the 1980s, or the early part of the 90s.

Identity politics includes the assertion of difference from ‘the West’, and the defenses against cultural invasions and ‘pollution’ by Western styles. The insistent emphasis on this theme is accompanied by its flagrant but largely unacknowledged subversion in everyday activity and styles, from dress, to food to music and entertainment, to media consumptions, to public spaces and general consumption patterns. While McDonald’s is boycotted because it is American, native fast food chains emerge which are direct imitations; the boycott of Coca Cola spawns Mecca Cola.

The immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is in the unfinished negative of which America is the proof.

The question really isn't whether I'm American, Russian, Iranian, Azerbaijani, or anything else. I've been shaped by all these people and cultures and I feel quite comfortable among all of them

The cinematic language and interior destiny of each Iranian film-maker is different. The international influences on them vary from Rossellini to Fellini, Akira Kurosawa to Hou Hsiao-hsien, but there is a strong sense of solidarity.

I'm always really interested in different environments and how they affect people's lives and what it would be like to live somewhere else.

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.

I think there are a lot of misconceptions on both sides, the developing vs. the developed world, especially about America. I've felt the frustration in my lack of belonging to any one place, but I've also felt it liberating to be able to appreciate something without feeling disloyal to my own culture.

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.