I'm so fascinated by the concept of teen pregnancy for some reason. Not that I condone it or promote it but it's just a very real thing in our country and culture.
I've been thinking about the distorted view of science that prevails in our culture. I've been wondering about this because our civilization is completely dependent on science and high technology yet most of us are alienated from science.
The world has become more complex as technology and easy travel mixes cultures without homogenizing them.
By 2007 we were finally living in a culture where people get what networks are and what technology can do to connect people.
Robots are interesting because they exist as a real technology that you can really study - you can get a degree in robotics - and they also have all this pop-culture real estate that they take up in people's minds.
I know there are lots of positives in the evolution of technology but I also think it will be responsible for the end of a unique character of a specific kind of geographical culture. The world is getting so small and mass production is getting so big. Everything is in danger of becoming the same.
Cinema reflects culture and there is no harm in adapting technology but not at the cost of losing your originality.
We humans are an extremely important manifestation of the replication bomb because it is through us - through our brains our symbolic culture and our technology - that the explosion may proceed to the next stage and reverberate through deep space.
The teacher of history's work should be ideally not simply a description of past cultures but a performance of the culture in which we live and are increasingly taking our being.
When I was writing 'The Abstinence Teacher ' I really tried to immerse myself in contemporary American evangelical culture.
I did not become successful in my work through embracing or engaging in celebrity culture. I never signed away my privacy in exchange for success.
When somebody has an enormous success in this culture people start asking two questions which are 'What are you doing now?' and 'How are you going to beat that?' And I have to say I love the assumption that your intention is to beat yourself constantly - that you're in battle against yourself.
The overall strength of Chinese culture and its international influence is not commensurate with China's international status. The international culture of the West is strong while we are weak.
I really think more fledgling novelists - and many current and even established novelists - should get out into the real world and cover local politics sports culture and crime and write it up on deadline.
Anyone could be in the orchestra or sports team or arts club at my school. It was precisely the kind of inclusivity that now meets with a sort of scorn and derision as a prizes-for-all culture that generates only mediocrity. There's something so insulting about the idea that including lots of people means mediocrity.
I think we have our sports within our own culture that are huge with baseball football basketball and hockey. Those are the sports in America that we grow up with and soccer isn't really there yet.
Olympism is the marriage of sport and culture.
That a society controls to a greater or lesser extent the behavior of its members is a universal but the methods the particulars of that control vary from one culture to another.
I do feel like I have always in my life been inclined to be on the outside walk a different path or something. Because of that and increasingly over the years my sense of distance from mainstream society or from the way culture works I have a different kind of perception of it.
You do not know our culture our ethics or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.
If you look at the footballers you look at our celebrity culture we seem to be saying 'This is the way you want to be'. We seem to be a society that celebrates all the wrong people.
Stabilizing the euro is one thing healing the culture that surrounds it is another. A world in which material values are everything and spiritual values nothing is neither a stable state nor a good society. The time has come for us to recover the Judeo-Christian ethic of human dignity in the image of God.
In an individualistic culture the narcissist is God's gift to the world. In a collectivist society the narcissist is God's gift to the collective.
We are all murderers and prostitutes - no matter to what culture society class nation one belongs no matter how normal moral or mature one takes oneself to be.
Art is a collaboration between God and the artist and the less the artist does the better.