Life & Wisdom Quote by Ken Follett

“Culture clash is terrific drama” is less a lofty thesis than a novelist’s clean admission of craft: conflict is plot fuel, and few conflicts arrive preloaded with stakes like two value systems colliding in the same room. Follett, a writer who’s made a career out of page-turners that move through class, religion, politics, and national identity, is naming the engine behind his kind of storytelling. He’s not praising misunderstanding as a social good; he’s praising its narrative efficiency.

The line works because it’s mildly unscrupulous. “Terrific” has a showman’s bounce, smoothing over the fact that culture clashes usually involve power, fear, and humiliation, not just colorful differences. That slippery cheerfulness is the subtext: drama doesn’t require moral purity, only friction. Put a character’s assumptions under pressure - about gender, faith, honor, money, speech - and you get instant reveals. People don’t explain themselves when they’re comfortable; they perform themselves when they’re threatened.

Context matters here: Follett writes in a mass-market tradition where historical settings and international backdrops aren’t just scenery, they’re stress tests. A monastery meets a marketplace. A small town meets empire. The “clash” lets him dramatize abstract forces (modernization, colonialism, war, migration) at human scale, through arguments, betrayals, alliances, desire.

There’s also a quiet warning embedded in the compliment. If culture clash is “terrific” drama, it’s because it exposes how thin our civil scripts are. The moment someone else doesn’t follow them, we find out which parts of our identity are beliefs and which are reflexes.