Ilya Ehrenburg Quotes

As one who loves literature, art, music and history, I've been deeply rooted in the Harlem Renaissance for many years.

The arts are very alive in Ireland, so that had its influence on me. But I consider myself European, really.

We need art more than ever as we stagger toward the Millennium.

A culture without mythology is not really a civilisation.

Cinema should always be in touch with the soil of the country. My films celebrate the heartland of India.

I'm an Indian-origin painter. I will remain so to my last breath.

A lot of those ideal towns are all starting to look the same, the specifics are starting to disappear. So we need to retain a love for life, a love for one's family, a love for where one's really from.

I wouldn't have been able to move to L.A. if I felt I was going to lose my identity as a New Jerseyian. My accent has gotten thicker since I've lived here.

Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.

If you want to understand a nation, look at its dancers and listen to its folk songs—don't pay any attention to its politicians.

Poems, novels - these things belong to the nation, to the culture, and the people.

The South is the last place with a sense of place.

I am born and brought up in Mumbai. I have grown up watching Hindi films. So I belong here, I feel.

I am a pakka South Indian at heart.

I'm so connected to the community that I was lucky enough to be born into.

I'm a black American playwright. I couldn't be anything else. I make my art out of black American culture; they're all cut out of the same cloth. That's who I am; that's who I write about.

The life of the arts is far from an interruption, a distraction, in the life of a nation, is close to the center of a nation's purpose-and is a test of the quality of a nations' civilization.

Two things significantly distinguish human beings from the other animals; an interest in the past and the possibility of language. Brought together they make a third: Art. The invisible city not calculated to exist. Beyond the lofty pretensions of the merely ceremonial, long after the dramatic connivings of plitical life, like it or not, it remains. Time past eternally present and undestroyed.

We should see to it that our people are steeped in a real knowledge and understanding of our national culture.

The impact of black music and black art forms on American culture is really difficult to appreciate.

The arts are not a luxury. They are an integral part of our lives as individuals and as a nation.

The culture of a civilization is the art and literature through which it rises to consciousness of itself and defines its vision of the world.

There are a number of things that set Southern artists apart from anyone else. Their obsession with place and their obsession with family.

The arts and humanities teach us who we are and what we can be. They lie at the very core of the culture of which we're a part.

One of the upsides of tourism is that people begin to take themselves a little more seriously (and think their) culture is worth something. So rather than disparaging the local culture, they vitalize it.