Paul Theroux Quotes

For a long time, I've been interested in cultural memory and historical erasure.

I don't think the isolation of the American writer is a tradition; it's more that, geographically, he just is isolated, unless he happens to live in New York City. But I don't suppose there's a small town around the country that doesn't have a writer.

Cultural concepts are one of the most fascinating things about historical fiction.

If you are a writer from Turkey, Pakistan, Nigeria, Egypt, you don't have the luxury of being apolitical. You can't say, 'That's politics. I'm just doing my work.'

I feel that, as a person of color, I've always been interested in the stories that are quiet and the stories that often get overlooked.

There are stories to be told that are still untold and characters to be portrayed that haven't been portrayed correctly. So there's work to be done.

When Thomas Mann arrived in California from Germany, they asked him about German literature. And he said, 'German literature is where I am.' It's really a bit grand, but if a German can afford it, I can afford it.

You cannot build a cultural identity without the images and sounds of your culture. Most countries in the third world - poor countries - they've lost their memories. Because everyday, films and cultural artifacts disappear. Film is also a memory - of the character and imagination of a culture.

America has had much more respect for its writers because they had to define what America was. America wasn't sure what it was.

American films are less American every day, because you have to please a world audience. There's less authenticity, so it's more accessible.

I want to tell you how proud I am to be the President of a nation that - in which there's a lot of Philippine-Americans. They love America and they love their heritage. And I reminded the President that I am reminded of the great talent of the - of our Philippine-Americans when I eat dinner at the White House.

I had many reasons for writing memoir but among them was the hope that every Latino child and adult would find something familiar in it.

Whether we're talking about race or gender or class, popular culture is where the pedagogy is, it's where the learning is.

If you cannot make moving pictures about yourself, your country and your culture, it's as if you do not exist anymore in this world of images we live in. Because now when we all switch on our smartphones or our iPads or our computers, it's all image and sound. All people and cultures must work to secure their place in the digital space. Cinema is also political in this way.

Representation is very important to everyone, but especially to girls like me, and people like me, whether it be because of my body, because of my race, because of my skin color, because of my awkwardness or where I come from.

I emphasize in it [my Orientalism] accortdingly that neither the term Orient nor the concept of the West has any ontological stability; each is made up of human effort, partly affirmation, partly identification of the Other.

I think there is no work of art which represents the spirit of a nation more surely than "Die Meister Singer" of Richard Wagner. Here is no plaything with local colour, but the raising to its highest power all that is best in the national consciousness of his country.

A poet must sing for his own people.

For a subject worked and reworked so often in novels, motion pictures, and television, American Indians remain probably the least understood and most misunderstood Americans of us all.

All I try to do is portray Indians as we are, in creative ways. With imagination and poetry. I think a lot of Native American literature is stuck in one idea: sort of spiritual, environmentalist Indians. And I want to portray everyday lives. I think by doing that, by portraying the ordinary lives of Indians, perhaps people learn something new.

Unless there is a strong sense of place there is no travel writing, but it need not come from topographical description; dialogue can also convey a sense of place. Even so, I insist, the traveler invents the place. Feeling compelled to comment on my travel books, people say to me, "I went there"---China, India, the Pacific, Albania-- "and it wasn't like that." I say, "Because I am not you.

My wearing my hair in locs on an Oscar red carpet was to showcase them in a positive light, to remind people of color that our hair is good enough.

At some point, you realize you can't provide a perfectly monolithic description of a foreign culture's future any more than you can provide a monolithic description of your own hometown's future. Your choices about what to emphasize and what to leave out make all the difference, and ultimately, your fingerprints and biases and viewpoints are going to be all over the story.

We're at an interesting phase of Asian and Asian-American writing, where we might succeed in having readers look at us as creative individuals who write with fury and fire about the world, and in new ways, without having them say things like "I read a really good Indian book," or "That Malaysian fellow writes very well." So I hope by identifying as Indian I can get people who don't usually read "ethnic" or "Indian" literature to read that literature and enjoy it.

Females carry the marks, language and nuances of their culture more than the male. Anything that is desired or despised is always placed on the female body.