Chaim Potok Quotes

I grew up in Africa surrounded by a lot of culture. It's made me aware that the world is a big place.

I think nowadays it doesn't really matter where we are physically located. We create our own culture around us to a large extent, whether it's what we're listening to, what we're watching, what we're reading - it can have very little to do with one's immediate cultural environment. We are in a global culture in that respect.

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.

Travelers never think that they are the foreigners

When you travel like I do, just within our own country the atmosphere is different. The environment is different; the way people talk is different. The energy is different. And that's just material-wise, with the local culture.

I've been exposed to so many different cultures.

I understand different cultures because I have travelled a lot.

A German immersed in any civilization different from his own loses a weight equivalent in volume to the amount of intelligence he displaces.

One of the great ambitions is to discover the diversity of the world, to discover who inhabits the world.

I'm certainly curious about people. As a kid, I moved around a lot. I was raised in a lot of different places, and thanks to working in the movies, I've gotten to keep traveling. I've always been interested in other cultures and languages.

What's the point of being an Australian guy traveling through India if you are going to go to India to meet other Australians?

I find it very beautiful to work in different countries because I see the mentality differences there. It is so rich, one always carries forward something.

Going to another country you're not in your house, you're with people you've never met before, and I think it's definitely a good growing experience.

It's trite to say that the world has gotten smaller in the age of globalization, but my travels have told me that it's wrong to think this means there is some kind of uniform world culture.

I am very, very proud I am also Turkish and both of my parents are from Turkey. I was born in Germany and grew up there. By playing football, I learned my different cultures, and that is an advantage if you grow up as a person. You get a different view on certain things. I am very, very thankful I was able to pick the best from many cultures.

American audiences very rarely deal with material outside their borders.

When I went to Australia, I had this feeling, like, 'Wow, this is really a different country.' I think that feeling of genuine foreignness, that this is a very different culture, which is increasingly rare in our globalised world.

I remember going to Taiwan for the first time and... I didn't realize that everyone looked like me here and what that'd feel like.

I didn't realize how interesting the place I come from is until I left home and saw how other cultures handled things differently.

There's a kind of integrity to being an observer of a culture. I think Canadians have that privilege innately. We are, like, the observers of the American culture.

I actually love the challenge of being in a new place where I'm so obviously the foreigner.

I think it's important to learn about the culture of the place where you live.

You can't escape culture. You can learn about it. You can criticize it. You can try to move it slowly. But at the end of the day, you can't actually opt out of the culture that you're in.

When I came to India, it's just a different country, but the culture was same that I grew up in.

I like to live like a local. When you are somewhere, you have to try to take the culture of that place and try to adapt.