Global Perspectives Quotes

The stories are there first, and they come from my experiences wandering around in the world. They will resonate into bigger things, forces sweeping the planet, themes and archetypes, but I'm not smart enough to have lucid integration of all that in my head as I'm writing.

In a lot of places in the United States and certainly even more places around the world, the image of the cowboy has become, for some people, a negative one. The word 'cowboy' implies a strong, stubborn individual whose individualism depends on pulling down other people's individualism.

I love work where I can find out more about the world and its history.

What Great Britain calls the Far East is to us the near north.

I try to explore, in terms of the life I know best, those things which are common to all cultures.

I don't understand why Europeans and South Americans can take more sophistication. Why is it that Americans need to hear their happiness major and their tragedy minor, and as jazzy as they can handle is a seventh chord? Are they not experiencing complex emotions?

America is divided by a great argument about itself. Europe is divided by a great argument about America.

The freedom to express yourself without fear - that perhaps is something we in the U.S. take for granted. It's almost inconceivable to think we would be afraid to express our opinions or thoughts, but that's not true for all parts of the world now, and certainly not before World War II.

I think Canadians are great satirists because we sit in the middle of these two giants: Great Britain and the U.S.

One of the biggest things I understood in a program like that was that it allowed more young African American scholars to do field research in the Caribbean and in Africa than had ever happened before in the history of the country and since.

I can see why the Russians love Robert Burns, I think that Russians and Koreans have a very similar outlook to Scots.

There is so much we can learn from TV. It's a window on the world.

I think you learn a lot about a country from its art. To me, it's part of the drama of life. It teaches you that there are places, moments and incidents in other cultures that genuinely have a life of their own.

I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the value of the Orientals themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.

Often, economists spend their energies squabbling with one another, but arguably the more important contrast is between our broadly liberal economic worldview and the various alternatives - common around the globe - that postulate natural hierarchies of religion, ethnicity, caste and gender, often enforced by law and strict custom.

I decided that Europeans and Americans are like men and women: they understand each other worse, and it matters less, than either of them suppose.

You've got to remember that films don't lead the way. People think that films are trying to lead society. Mostly, they're reflecting the moods and thoughts that are going on in the country or around the world.

My stories deal with multicultural situations as well as multigenerational settings.

Obviously there are divisions within the West and divisions within Islam - there are different sects, different communities, different countries. So neither one is homogenous at all. But they do have things in common.

People who have followed my career still call me Ron, and that's OK; most of the young kids call me Metta, and then everyone in China calls me Panda. In the Middle East, they call me World Peace.

Inside Iran, people are actually quite well-educated about America. There are things they don't understand, particularly in the government, but the people, by and large, know the American sensibility quite well, and the reverse is not true.

When I go to Europe or South America, they laugh at things that are totally different than what Americans would laugh at. It's just so crazy how we're so different in personalities with other people.

You can't kill America. We're more than a nation. We're a notion. We're an idea. The American Dream. You never heard of the Afghanistani Dream have you. Except by bearded hermetic recluses with a fetish for uneducated women dressed as giant shuttlecocks.

There is no story that is not true, [...] The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others.

My being in America and being adopted from the Philippines have given me motivation and drive as an artist.