Cultural Assumption Quotes

No one in Montreal learns how to skate. You're just born that way.

Are you Polish? Okay, I'll talk slower.

I was surprised by some of my French colleagues who immediately assumed that because I spoke English with an American accent, that, therefore, you must be a supporter of whoever is the current president of the United States. There seems to be this widespread feeling that, 'Oh, American accent - therefore, you like cowboy boots.'

My voice is who I am, who I was when I was 3, and who I am going to be when I am 90 years old. When I hit the stage and people do not know who I am, they automatically assume, before I open my mouth, I am going to sing a Bob Marley song!

Don't let the American accent fool you. I am British.

People expect someone with the name 'Israel Horovitz' to be a little old man with sideburns carrying a Torah.

When I was a little kid at home, I thought the whole world was Jewish. For years I thought Roosevelt was Jewish. I loved him. I thought of him as my father. I'm always stunned when I find out that people like Roosevelt and Tolstoy weren't Jewish. How could I love them so much?

I never tried to emulate that New York rap style. What I do is a quasi rap. It's a honky rap, not a black rap. I find it puzzling that so many people have assumed I'm black.

I know, everybody thinks that all Aussies love beer. I guess most of them do, but not me.

iPod liberalism [is] where we assume that every single Iranian or Chinese who happens to have and love his iPod will also love liberal democracy.

My last name is Levesque, but I don't speak French.

I've often gone to start a film only to find the producers surprised to discover that I'm American.

I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.

The basic idea that the purpose of life is to be happy or is to experience the most favorable ratio of pleasure to suffering or productivity to work or gratification to sacrifice or any of that stuff, which, you know, a couple generations ago, to say that kind of stuff would have made you, you know, a freak - a freak and an Epicurean - and now seems to be so much - simply an unquestioned assumption of the culture that we don't really even talk about it anymore.

The question is how to bring a work of imagination out of one language that was just as taken-for-granted by the persons who used it as our language is by ourselves. Nothing strange about it.

I don't know how you can be an All-American in this country and not be a good basketball player.

Everyone still thinks I'm Scottish - that's totally wicked.

Before anyone learns my last name, they always assume I have some type of Latin background in me somewhere. I love it! I think the Latin culture is sexy. It's one of my goals to learn to speak Spanish one day; then I will really be able to fool people!

The modern superstition is that we're free of superstition.

When I started, there was more of a cultural assumption that many readers would find gay characters irrelevant or repugnant.

Every savage can dance.

It was always a false assumption that white American writers cannot write novels about race unless they're approaching it from a very oblique angle.

All a Jew has to do is recite a few proverbs or anecdotes to consider himself an expert on 'Jewishness.'

All of Hollywood is run on one assumption: That women will watch stories about men, but men won't watch stories about women. It is a horrible indictment of our society of we assume that one half of our population is just not interested in the other half.

I came to town thinking that everybody had the same idea of what country music was that I did.