Patti Smith Quotes

I've never felt entirely comfortable in high society. I'm more comfortable talking to the bar staff than the super-rich. I don't really get what makes them tick.

Being a posh actor in England you cannot escape the class-typing from whatever side you look at it.

It is impossible, in our condition of Society, not to be sometimes a Snob.

Having gone to a public school, I thought I knew about posh people. But I didn't know anything until I went to Oxford.

Do not mistake a crowd of big wage-earners for the leisure class.

The bourgeois are other people.

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

I've got to be high class... Which is sad, because I like bars.

I don't understand all about New York society. It's only when they are in trouble that I'm really interested.

I'm not a bourgeois person, never will be.

Of course the lower classes have always felt downtrodden and aspired to a better life. But there is this theory that people respond to a class structure in England - there was a time when people knew who they were and knew whom they served and as long as management wasn't abusive, it was a good life for people.

I'm not posh, not in the slightest. My parents spent some money on my education, but I wasn't born to the purple.

'Posh' is not really political. I didn't want to aim a brickbat at the system. Or to bash Old Etonians. It was always the class and privilege aspect of that world that I was most drawn to. There is something endlessly fascinating about imagining something you could never be involved in.

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.

At present there is no distinction among the upper ten thousand of the city.

I'm not interested in classes ... Far be it from me to foster inferiority complexes among the workers by trying to make them think they belong to some special class.

The tradesmen are the only gentry in England.

Eccentricity is usually owned by middle-class and upper-class people. If you are working class and eccentric, then you're just mad.

I don't think I met anyone posh until I went to London.

It was hugely helpful to me, being South African. I have never felt uncomfortable in posh society because I don't see what it is that I'm meant to be bowing the knee about.

You're a socialite because you're born into it. That's not what I want.

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

These families, you know, are our upper crust, not upper ten thousand.

The fact that I spent my life in universities in a manner that I no longer have close identification with bricklayers is a pain to me.

I come from an Irish working-class background but went to a posh school, and any type of pretension was quickly mocked at home. I've always had a keen eye for pretension.