Luca Guadagnino Quotes

I don't like intellectuals, or, at least, people who call themselves that way, because I am under the impression that there is always something condescending in their demeanour, and I don't like condescending people.

A mugwump is a person educated beyond his intellect.

They may be a little more high brow than we are.

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.

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.

When I was in college, I was a semiotics major, which is this hopelessly pretentious body of French literary theory.

An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.

In England only uneducated people show off their knowledge; nobody quotes Latin or Greek authors in the course of conversation, unless he has never read them.

I think it's easy to make impenetrable music that nobody can get, and you can hide behind that sometimes.

I studied English at Princeton in the early eighties in what I consider a period of high obscurity. Professors and students ran around discussing the work of critics and philosophers that I doubt they'd read or understood.

It's the time of year when the literati give advice on what we should be reading on our summer holidays. These terrifying lists often leave me appalled at my own ignorance, but also suspicious about the pretension of their advocates.

The intelligent are to the intelligentsia what a gentleman is to a gent.

I come from a very la-ti-da East Coast intellectual family - or so they think.

No social class, intellectual category or art form is immune to the snob virus.

Earnestness is stupidity sent to college.

The art house is an elitist idea.

The art world is the biggest joke going. It's a rest home for the overprivileged, the pretentious, and the weak. And modern art is a disgrace - never have so many people used so much stuff and taken so long to say so little.

He who meanly admires mean things is a Snob.

But, of course only morons would ever think or speak of themselves as intellectuals. That's why they all look so sad.

Even the most elitist director or author who claims that he doesn't care if his works are seen or not, then I have to think that he's either a liar or a hypocrite.

If these Essays were worthy of being judged, it might fall out, in my opinion, that they would not find much favour, either with common and vulgar minds, or with uncommon and eminent ones: the former would not find enough in them, the latter would find too much; they might manage to live somewhere in the middle region.

There are a lot of self important people who make you believe they're artistes and high on the intelligence quotient and I've sat down and listened to them and just been bored.

If you want to be a Roman Catholic scholar and write, you've got to write in such a way that nobody understands what you're saying, and then you're thought to be profound.

Intellectuals never sound more foolish than when posing as the last civilised man.

You know, you can always pick the lit students," he continued, grinning. "Is that so? How?" "They're the ones who walk around wearing berets and that I-know-something-you-don't expression.