Bill Bruford Quotes

I think it's important to live as much of your life as possible in the real world. If you live a life that's limited to the Westside of Los Angeles, you're only going to see people like you.

If there is an interpreter sitting between two friends, he may be able to translate the words but not the feelings with which I say something.

I feel my heart break to see a nation ripped apart by it's own greatest strength - it's diversity.

If you are socially isolated, you are more vulnerable to stereotypes and myths; you won't have the opportunity to have conversations with someone who has a different social background than you.

One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.

Washington is a great international city and in the congregation we have people who are rich and poor, black and white, and from every part of the world.

Ours is a colourful and diversified world. It is also a complex one.

I see more genuine sociability between the races in Mississippi than I see in Michigan. No question.

If we ever start communicating with living creatures from other planets, the number one priority is, how are you going to communicate information? Even between different cultures here on Earth, you get into communication problems.

As an American man of the 1990s writing about a Japanese woman of the 1930s, I needed to cross three cultural divides - man to woman, American to Japanese, and present to past.

I guess the biggest surprise I got going to Iran was that the Iranians really liked me as an American.

I love the exploration of someone who has such a different background from you. That exploration runs to compassion and to cracking yourself open and creating more understanding of how weird and amazing life is.

I grew up in L.A. in a school that was diverse, but it was not really integrated, so I didn't ever fully fit in with the black girls or the white girls or the Latina girls.

I prefer to put myself in an environment that's further afield and look through the eyes of someone who differs from me in age, ethnicity, gender, and/or social class. I think a little displacement makes me a sharper observer.

We in the so called 'Western civilisations' have so much to learn from other cultures, and they would stand to gain so much by learning from ours. We don't have all the answers - far from it... but nor do any other culture or religion.

I've been with all walks of life... All people from all status.

You can't share things about India with Americans, as they don't seem interested. Their culture is different.

At Harvard, I grew up a lot in terms of being able to deal with different types of people because where I grew up in Arizona, it's predominately white and predominantly Mormon families, so there's not a whole lot of diversity.

It was hard for an American to understand the contented acceptance by English men and women of permanent places in the lowest social rank.

I think Hip Hop and Gospel are such strong distinct cultures that have problems, unspoken problems obviously, but problems with one another. On the hip hop side, it's the problems of "awe man I don't like the suits and ties," and on the Gospel side it's " awe man they need to pull their pants up." I just think those are minor, really small issues that we just need to get over and learn to help each other. We're all on the same , and in the same boat.

If we go into white congregations, non-whites will sometimes say it felt like worship never started. It was sort of dead and didn't feel that warmly received. But so - and there are different realities either way, and it makes it difficult for all groups to try and cross boundaries.

We have a relational problem with those who are suffering or who are different from us. All of us are most comfortable around people who are like us culturally and economically.

Most of my friends, growing up, were upper-middle-class white kids, so it was a different reality at home both culturally and linguistically. It created a lot of insecurities for me, but it also did a lot of amazing things that I didn't know were happening at the time.

In fact, in the original folk tale, Aladdin was actually of Chinese descent. So what we wanted to do with this was represent as many different cultures from that part of the world as possible.

Growing up in America, I experienced two puberties. The first opened me up to the possibilities of adulthood. The second reinforced that for someone like me - an immigrant, a minority, an Asian-American - there were limits.