Cultural Discovery Quotes

I did this whole series on the buffalo soldiers-on black soldiers-I did another series on black cowboys, and I presented myself to the gallery system, and all these people with these massive collections didn't know there were black cowboys or black soldiers. I ended up hitting a niche I didn't know was there.

For the first time since I began acting, I feel that I've found my place in the world, that there's something out of my own culture which i can express and perhaps help others preserve..i have found out now that the African natives had a definite culture a long way beyond the culture of the Stone age...an integrated thing, which is still unspoiled by western influences...I think the Americans will be amazed to find how many of the modern dance steps are relics of African heritage.

I love London. I came here to discover something different. It's a great city; I like how people think here.

When I went to Africa I think that was when I really found a way to deal with what I had recently discovered; in two-dimensional terms, at least.

I was signed when I was 19 years old, in 1980. I went to Germany and France. Seeing the world at that time was just an awesome experience for a teenager.

We did not know there were other people besides the Indian until about one hundred winters ago, when some men with white faces came to our country.

When I found out more about the Maori culture, I fell in love with it, and with the people, too.

To travel is to discover that everybody is wrong. The philosophies, the civilizations which seem, at a distance, so superior to those current at home, all prove on a close inspection to be in their own way just as hopelessly imperfect.

Growing up in Singapore, I wasn't allowed to visit China. So when I was finally able to go there after the country began opening up to tourism in the 1990s, I found it to be utterly astounding.

Going to the U.A.E. for the first time was a real cultural shock. Everything was different. People didn't speak my language, it was all new, a huge change. But I loved it.

I went to Berlin for a year and a half, and that's where I learned about culture and art and everything. Before that, I lived in total absence of culture. I come from a house where there was nothing like reading or art.

I think I was interested in history without knowing it and that became very clear when I arrived in France. Everything that I was really interested in was there, but I knew nothing, no education, no art education, no education beyond high school. It was extremely overwhelming and it still is.

It may sound weird, but I don't really look for culture, particularly in an American city.

I take very seriously the sense of our living these days in a global neighborhood. And the first sensible thing to do in such circumstances, as well as one of the most rewarding things, is to go and meet the neighbors, find out who they are, and what they think and feel. So travel for me is an act of discovery and of responsibility as well a grand adventure and a constant liberation.

Nothing on my trip thus far was as I expected which shows you that rather than simply read about the United States you have to log the journey.

Ireland is a place that's beautiful and interesting, but I remember when I went there as a teenager with my parents, I was like, "Okay, I'll go to Ireland with my parents. It's going to be green." I think people underestimate it, in that it's, "Oh, it's green," and then you get there, and it's like, "Wow, it is green!" It's, "Oh, there's Irish music," and then you get there, and you're like, "Oh, this Irish music is amazing!" You underestimate it.

A person can do a lot of reading and research as I have done. I went to Spain and spent a whole summer there with my family, immersing myself in the culture. But all that isn't really necessary to experience the music.

Books have to be read (worse luck it takes so long a time). It is the only way of discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the West.

It all goes back to 'Wow, I never knew this about Marco Polo.' This is an incredible story and an incredible character, and such a rich world of Mongolian and Chinese culture.

I remember the first time I went to Italy when I was eighteen, I was in Florence and there were all these eighteen, nineteen, twenty-year-olds gliding past on Vespas with crinkly, long, hair, and I thought I was on the set of a movie. I couldn't believe that this was going on and I hadn't known about it before. I was flabbergasted.

Living in England is fascinating: I discover a new world every day.

I had the urge to examine my life in another culture and move beyond what I knew.

In 1492, the natives discovered they were Indians; they discovered they lived in America.

At the beginning of my career, as a boy from Peru in London, suddenly discovering British culture and society, I looked so much at the work of the photographers Cecil Beaton and Norman Parkinson, which seemed to represent a wonderful vanished grandeur of my new country.

I could do one show after another in China for the rest of my life and still die ignorant. There's a lot of places left to go.