Terry Zwigoff Quotes

We are turning the world into a McDonald’s ecosystem with the same species living roughly the same way everywhere.

When I'm doing a book tour in the States, I'll wake up in the room sometimes in an anonymous chain hotel, and I don't know where I am right away. I'll go to the window, and it doesn't help there either, especially if you're in an anonymous strip and it's the usual Victoria's Secret, Gap, Chili's, Applebee's.

Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents.

Discount air fares, a car in every parking space and the interstate highway system have made every place accessible - and every place alike.

I see the same coffee table everywhere. It's mass marketing.

Capital burns off the nuance in a culture. Foreign investment, global markets, corporate acquisitions, the flow of information through transnational media, the attenuating influence of money that's electronic and sex that's cyberspaced, untouched money and computer-safe sex, the convergence of consumer desire--not that people want the same things, necessarily, but that they want the same range of choices.

Life in Anaheim, California, was a commercial for itself, endlessly replayed. Nothing changed; it just spread out farther and farther in the form of neon ooze. What there was always more of had been congealed into permanence long ago, as if the automatic factory that cranked out these objects had jammed in the on position.

[The 'corporate takeover of people's lives'] also accounts for a lot of homogenization of culture. There are fast food restaurants everywhere. Every place tastes the same.

It is sad that the more 'successful' a neighborhood becomes, the more it gradually takes on a recognizable, common look, as the same banks, drugstore chains and national brands move in.

All the airports kind of feel and look the same now. Some are more beautiful, some are less beautiful, but for the most part you're going to find a Starbucks in every airport. You're going to get your coffee and the 'USA Today' or 'New York Times' in every airport.

One of the shocking things when I go back to Canada is they cut off the tall trees - it's sort of like everyone's the same. Everyone's going to be the same, we're all okay. Just the, sort of, cultural, 'We're all okay.'

Sometimes when you're in different countries, everything has become so homogenised and there's a Starbucks and McDonald's everywhere, and you could feel like you're in Florida. But in Japan, you know you're there.

Despite the obvious damage now visible in the entropic desolation of every American home town, Wal-Mart managed to install itself in the pantheon of American Dream icons, along with apple pie, motherhood, and Coca Cola.

My generation is so used to having our public spaces look like the Starbucks, with the beautiful lighting and the little bit of Nina Simone and my coffee that's blended a certain way from Costa Rica.

The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition... always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.

I'm afraid that everything will get homogenized and be the same.

Food should be cheap, and labor should be cheap, and everything should be the same no matter where you go; whether it's a McDonald's in Germany or one in California, it should be the same. And this message is destroying cultures around the world. Needless to say, agriculture goes with it.

The chief business of the American people is business.

Country has become too homogenized and too commercial. It has lost what makes it special. It's great that it's popular, but then it starts to become watered down.

It baffles me that everything is so homogenized, because the world isn't, and yet we continue to support things that are so incredibly milquetoast.

The '90s was a decade of mundane market-consumer nothingness where there was nothing coming up from the streets; you just had someone in an office deciding what was cool.

Commerce seems to be covering every aspect of our lives now. Which me, because I'm a romantic, is sad for me to say.

TV has made everyone so vanilla it's nearly impossible to tell one anchor apart from another.

So many people want to have this typical look and this typical everything and it's all the same everywhere.

If New York has just become a mall for the world, then what's the difference between being here and somewhere else?