Jhumpa Lahiri Quotes

I've been to Africa three times. All right? You can't bring Western reasoning into the culture. The same way you can't bring it into fundamental Islam.

Some things are really sacred and important to other cultures, so you have to be aware, politically, about those things before you just adopt them.

We are, at almost every point of our day, immersed in cultural diversity: faces, clothes, smells, attitudes, values, traditions, behaviours, beliefs, rituals.

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.

There are cultural issues everywhere - in Bangladesh, Latin America, Africa, wherever you go. But somehow when we talk about cultural differences, we magnify those differences.

People have to identify with their own stories, with their own lives, so a movie belongs to a country and to a culture. Sometimes we can share, but it's very rare.

Any direct experience that I have with indigenous peoples and their plights may feed into the nature of the story I choose to tell. In fact, it almost certainly will.

Value the perspective of different cultures and recognize the cultural mores that underpin groups and appreciate why these are valued and important.

It's important to tell the story you're telling in the right way, which might involve black people or people of whatever heritage or ethnicity - or it might not.

Others think their American ways will work in other countries. That's not always accurate and can be disrespectful to the local culture.

We cannot just ape the west. What may be good in an alien country may be unpalatable in India.

At about the age of seven … I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather: how lovely it was that the sun had come out. This despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria; we didn’t have snow, we ate mangoes, and we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to.

I'm a British intern going in. I'm hoping that John will just kind of tackle it from who this person is and what she's about rather than trying to go in on her culture. We need to move a step forward than that.

There is no way that we know what is going on between the African American and the Asian American. We don't understand what an Indigenous American is. We don't understand what a Latino American is.

The two cultures of East and West are very different, and the priorities are very different. So when you understand that - if you are from this side or this side - when you understand that the other is different than you, and you respect these differences, you can build communication.

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

The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.

I haven't met everyone from all different cultures, but I do know Aussies are very tough.

When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.

I think Anna and the King is a look at Asia from the Asian perspective, reflecting the Asian experience, which is very rare.

I don't think anyone could write about another culture and get it 100 percent accurate.

Black culture is something I don't relate to much at all.

My experience of Chinese culture is indirect, through echoes. When I approach the cashier at my local Chinese supermarket, they switch to English before I've even said a word. They somehow know that I'm not quite Chinese enough.

In the design process, there's a need to be culturally comprehensive.

Seriously, some Americans just shouldn't leave the country.