Sandra Tsing Loh Quotes

When I was growing up, there was a feeling in one's living room as much as in one's local gallery that a little elitism was good for the soul.

You get the feeling that many of my guests feel that the French language gives them entry into a more cultivated, more intelligent world, more highly civilised too, with rules.

The art house is an elitist idea.

I'm not all that enthralled by show business, and I'm not that much of a highbrow.

In TV, film, and music there's a lot of snobbery, and I don't like it. I've never been a cultural snob.

I want to listen to Beethoven and Mozart. I want to read the best minds. I want to live with uplifting art. I don't want to live a grubby life.

Two of my favorite artists are Josh Smith and Joe Bradley. But I argued against them for years, until I grew to love them and felt stupid for my immediate reaction towards their work.

Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world

I'm sorry - you know, culture is elitist. Culture has to be elitist: it's about seeing and knowing and about knowledge.

Popular culture is seductive; high culture is imperious.

An artist should be well read in the best books, and thoroughly high bred, both in heart and bearing. In a word, he should be fit for the best society, and should keef out of it.

My husband's family was terribly refined. Within their circle you could know Beethoven, but God forbid if you were Beethoven.

A man that has a taste of music, painting, or architecture, is like one that has another sense, when compared with such as have no relish of those arts

My tastes in all things lean towards the arty and boring. I like sports documentaries about Scrabble players, bands that play quiet, unassuming music, and TV shows that win awards. In that way, I am an elitist snob.

You can't prove Rembrandt is better than Norman Rockwell - although if you actually do prefer Rockwell, I'd say you were shunning complexity, were secretly conservative, and hadn't really looked at either painter's work. Taste is a blood sport.

When I was growing up, I was the most pretentious person I have ever met. I only read obscure books and watched obscure movies and only listened to obscure music.

Men of polite learning and a liberal education.

It used to be that readers were relegated because they considered themselves far above society, and so the metaphor of the ivory tower developed. Now there's still this idea that the reader doesn't take part in the social game and in politics, the res publica, but for other reasons: he doesn't do it because he's not making any money.

In England, literary pretence is more universal than elsewhere from our method of education.

I think this confusion leads intellectuals and artists themselves to believe that the elite arts and humanities are a kind of higher, exalted form of human endeavor.

I didn't come from any kind of academic background, but I lived in a college town and I knew people who weren't without pretense. There was this idea in the town that if something was European it would be good.

I'm not very sympathetic to the tendency to bring art to the people.

A high-brow is someone who looks at a sausage and thinks of Picasso.

An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger.

The British film industry has always tried to sell itself as something rather sophisticated. It's almost as if it thinks it is by royal command. It has always tried to claim the high ground, not only over Hollywood but over the whole of humanity!