Rufus Wainwright Quotes

To me, being a classical snob in the highest possible way and being an indie snob is just as bad!

I met someone with a title on my first day, Baronet von Something, and I thought: 'Look at me, I've really grafted. Who are these people who have just waltzed into Oxford? I don't want to hang out with those people. They're nothing like me.'

I've never felt opera was a party I've been invited to, and maybe I've got a bit of a chip on my shoulder about it.

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.

The white working class likes being pandered to even less than it likes being insulted.

By vulgarity I mean that vice of civilization which makes man ashamed of himself and his next of kin, and pretend to be somebody else.

I've never been aware of the difference between so-called posh actors and working-class actors.

Class isn't something you buy. Look at you. You have a $500 suit on and you're still a lowlife.

Candidates don't want to be associated with poor people, people who have jobs or are ugly; they want to be associated with a certain middle class demographic, so as a result they leave those others out completely.

I'm not from the working class. I'm from the criminal class.

All the people I know have been conditioned by snobbery.

The old world of England was picturesque and safe in a way that L.A. wasn't, but it was so amazingly socially cruel. I had never experienced that in America - never in school, nowhere.

I still assume that, any day, I'm going to be exposed as a fraud. That, like I once heard Gene Hackman say, the acting police are going to burst in and take away my card.

If someone is very upper-class, you have a stereotype of him which is probably true. If someone has a working-class accent, you have no idea who you're talking to.

I don't like a class system. I don't like the idea of being in a different class than other people.

I feel like certain people think that certain styles of music will taint their jazz style.

It used to be you wanted to marry up.

The civility which money will purchase, is rarely extended to those who have none.

When you're a little kid, you just like music that makes you happy and is fun. As you get older, you reach college or your 20s and you decide that music should be challenging and all art should be smart. So you start to think it makes you like high art more to put down things you consider low art. I don't even think things are low art.

I've had to spend an awful lot of my life trying to pretend I'm not posh. Although once I open my mouth, I rather let things out the bag.

The Porsche was just a vehicle to get to another place. I used it to change people's perceptions of me. I had grown up really middle class. USC was filled with elitists, richies who would go skiing every weekend. So I pretended like I was part of that world - to be accepted.

You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs except in England, of course.

He that despises his neighbor's happiness because he wears a worsted cap or a leather apron, he that struts immeasurably above the lower size of the people, and pretends to adjust the rights of the men by the distinctions of fortune

This College system went into practice to draw a line of demarcation between the two classes of society—it separated the children of the rich from the children of the poor.

I never knew the lower classes had such white skins.