Back in the 1500s, the culture that we had built in the West embraced multigenerational projects quite easily. Notre Dame. Massive cathedrals were not built over the course of a few years, they were built over a few generations. People who started building them knew they wouldn't be finished until their grandson was born.
We were a religious, practicing, Catholic family - Mass together on Sunday, Catholic schools, and parents who practiced everything they preached. A great gift was their total absence of any derogatory talk about people of any race or culture and we were on a street of many faiths, though no other races at that early time.
Besides Christianity and specifically Catholicism being wonderful, Christmas is intrinsic to American culture and worth defending. Think of what happens at Christmas time. People play Mariah Carey Christmas songs... What else do you need in life?
I'm not certain that I draw from any one culture more than others. Many myths and legends of many different cultures are really the same story when you get to the heart of it. They are often cultural cautionary tales about how we should behave and how we should live.
We live in a dominant culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress that has so far lasted two or three centuries.
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 think there ought to be some serious discussion by smart people, really smart people, about whether or not proliferation of things like The Smoking Gun and TMZ and YouTube and the whole celebrity culture is healthy.
It's easy to get swept up in the trappings of that sort of lifestyle, but I've been doing it for long enough that I know how easy it is to fall victim to that sort of arrogance and cockiness that celebrity culture can bring about, in young men especially.
This celebrity culture that hypnotizes people into thinking a person is literally not real because you see them on television is a spell the watcher him- or herself must break.
We can be a little less organized in Stockholm; it's not really that serious. And on the White Marble tour in Europe - I don't think there's as much hardcore fans as in the U.S. In the U.S., it's like this whole celebrity culture.
I'm not really part of that 'L.A. thing' or that celebrity culture. I'm more like someone who observes it, and I can't ever imagine being like that.
I think celebrity culture and sexuality in pop music is really important, but I want there to be an alternative for people.
This obsession with celebrity culture is really unhealthy. I don't want to live my life like that, and I don't want to be a typical pop star.
I got overwhelmed by the magnitude of the celebrity culture in America. My background is as a news journalist, and newsrooms in the US are shrinking - investigation teams are being terminated or shrunk on newspapers all around the country. The one aspect that's expanded is coverage of celebrity culture.
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.
The whole celebrity culture thing - I'm fascinated by, and repelled by, and yet I end up knowing about it.
The more celebrities I meet, the more disappointed I get in celebrity culture.
Even when writing your own poems, you need to talk to people; you need to magpie around, getting words and things. I'm very against the celebrity culture that wants to say: 'this is a genius, this is one person who has done something brilliant.' There are always a hundred people in the background who have helped to make it.
I hope people online understand that the celebrity culture we've created is not really real. So when they're speaking to and about me, I'm a person, so I'm going to make mistakes. It's inevitable because I'm human.
You have not quite lived in this ridiculously silly celebrity culture until you've been told one day how loved you are and the next day how hated you are - and sometimes by the same individual.
