New Zealand Culture Quotes

I do think of myself very strongly as a New Zealander, but when I moved out to the States, I was aware that I didn't want to just live in a satellite community of only other New Zealanders.

When you think of famous New Zealanders, there aren't many.

I'm a New Zealand actor, and I really want to be doing our stuff here, and our stuff includes plays from overseas. In terms of survival, maybe I should have taken a shot elsewhere at some point, but it gets back to the same theme - we should have our own people telling our own stories.

In New Zealand, men and women would not take a party seriously if it did not have a good gender - and increasingly racial - mix. It's not about being politically correct; it's just who we are.

Kiwis, we love a good one out. We love a good fight. This is part of the culture. Straight up. We're a country of a warrior race, the Maori.

We grow up in New Zealand from a young age getting up at 3am to watch the All Blacks play South Africa or England, it's part of who we are. So to be an All Black now is amazing.

The core of the film [Hunt for the Wilderpeople] is that relationship. Whether they're getting on or whether they're not. If that relationship works, then everything else works as well. And you kind of almost, sort of, gives into a realm of something like New Zealand magic realism... There is no world in which social work is actually pursues some kid into the woods in this manner.

What Taika [Watiti] still bring to it [Hunt for the Wilderpeople], it really sums up what life is like in New Zealand, or what our sensibilities, our sense of humor, how we come together, how easy it would be, feels like. You know, we have a small population and so you know the bizarreness of the police getting involved in this manhunt, how the men... And then eventually, the army all get intwines.

The idea of New Zealanders sounding like Americans is not it. You got to rhyme in your language, your accent.

People in New Zealand go out of their way to not be impressed by things.

I think it would be impossible not to be an Internet kid, coming from New Zealand, because culturally it's a little barren.

New Zealand is a country of thirty thousand million sheep, three million of whom think they are human.

It's good to see some Kiwi accents up on the big screen.

As a kid in New Zealand, you play cricket in summer and rugby in winter. I played cricket and hockey. Not rugby. I wasn't brawny enough for it. Or silly enough, perhaps.

An interesting thing about New Zealand, you know, literature is that it really didn't begin in any real sense until the 20th century.

I would have thought there's no greater country to watch rugby than New Zealand.

There's not much of a follow-your-dreams kind of vibe in New Zealand or my family.

New Zealanders have conventions and pleasantries, but we are direct. We are encouraged to be transparent with our behavior and not to employ passive aggression.