Stephen King Quotes

I think everyone's inherently snobbish. Things that are very popular are not taken seriously, because the snobbish side of one says, 'Well, if everyone likes it it can't be that good.' Whereas if only I and a couple of other people like it, then it must be really something special.

The reality of America is mass-market stupidity.

I feel like Africans are too often portrayed as people on the National Geographic channel: the image is of an African man in a loincloth chasing a gazelle. It's not intentionally racist; I wouldn't call it racist at all. It's a lack of understanding another culture.

I definitely have to admit that I am fairly ignorant, not just to 'Tron,' but almost any pop culture thing that I should know, at my age. I grew up without a television and rarely got to see a movie, so I didn't really see any of that stuff, and I haven't been able to catch up since.

He who never leaves his country is full of prejudices.

I'm only stopped by people in uniform, whether it's customs people, janitors, or the FBI - they all watch 'The Wire.' Sadly, beautiful, glamorous women don't know anything about it.

I have this theory that people in Hollywood don't read. They read 'Vanity Fair' and then consider themselves terribly well read. I think I can basically write about anybody without getting caught.

… when we know a thing we have only scorn for other people who don’t happen to know it.

I like writing about popular culture. It helps to place people. I think you can be really, really accurate if you know enough about it, and place people precisely.

I was talking to a TV bigwig, and he said, 'Nobody under 35 knows who Sammy Davis is.' Well, you'll hear angry denials of that from younger people.

The white explorers had been my heroes. The Aborigines, I thought they were real savages. That was what I'd been taught and that's what I believed.

Do we really have to wander around apologizing for enjoying plot, just because James Wood and a few dozen other arch-aesthetes sniff at it? It's like being careful not to sing pop songs in the shower because some guy in the local alt-weekly is a music snob.

The average English critic is a don manqué, hopelessly parochial when not exaggeratedly teutonophile, over whose desk must surely hang the motto (presumably in Gothic lettering) "Above all no enthusiasm".

There's a big anti-intellectual strain in the American south, and there always has been. We're not big on thought.

Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic.

For a Westerner to trash Western culture is like criticizing our nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere on the grounds that it sometimes gets windy, and besides, Jupiter's is much prettier. You may not realize its advantages until you're trying to breathe liquid methane.

... the modern drama, operating through the double channel of dramatist and interpreter, affecting as it does both mind and heart,is the strongest force in developing social discontent, swelling the powerful tide of unrest that sweeps onward and over the dam of ignorance, prejudice, and superstition.

He was so learned that he could name a horse in nine languages; so ignorant that he bought a cow to ride on.

We must abandon the prevalent belief in the superior wisdom of the ignorant.

What were you going to do tonight?" "I was going to listen to the songs of Rachmaninoff." "Who's that?" "A dead Russian.

When people say stuff like, "Oh, that's soft rock. I don't listen to that," I find that elitist. It's music-racist.

Though we do not have many poets, we certainly have more than we deserve, for we deserve none at all. It is ourselves that we are hurting by our stupidity and ignorance of poetry.

Our system doesn't work, and it doesn't work, ultimately, not because of Sarah Palin, or the christian right, or Glenn Beck. It doesn't work because the liberal class failed us. The liberal class failed to find the intellectual and moral fortitude to defend liberal values at a time that they were under egregious assault.

The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad.

It's not Brits who think American readers are a bunch of whinging morons with the geo-social understanding of a wire coathanger, it's American editors.