Mark Helprin Quotes

I really don't like having to get dressed up.

I've gotten to that point where I'm so used to being sweaty, wearing pants, and sitting like a guy in boots. When I'm dressed up and people are touching me up and doing the whole thing, I'm less comfortable with that.

I'm not good at dressing up. I always feel a bit out of place. It's just not me - high heels and designer dresses - and I can't seem to get used to it.

I'm not normally big on suits.

I like to stay away from that red carpet world unless I absolutely have to do it. I'd rather put on my Tom Ford suit and take a few pictures at home.

The hat is not for the street: it will never be democratized. But there are certain houses that one cannot enter without a hat. And one must always wear a hat when lunching with people whom one does not know well. One appears to one's best advantage.

I had a period in my life, maybe a decade or so, in which I was involved in that kind of thing, associating with the elite of various segments of society. It always made me extremely uncomfortable. I couldn't wait to get out of there and change my clothes. The good part about that was getting home and changing into my regular clothes. Taking off the suit and the tie, taking off the tight shoes, and just relaxing. Being away from that stuff. It was stimulating, but I never liked it. I always felt it was a terrible, terrible burden.

Ascot is so exclusive that it is the only racecourse in the world where the horses own the people.

If you wear a suit, you can talk to anybody.

Whenever I've worn trousers or a suit, it always makes me feel sexy but effortless and confident.

What's more interesting are the dynamics between people that involve hypocrisy or ignoring each other. That's what I want to write about. I like to make people uncomfortable because it's something we should be uncomfortable about.

Why don't I like crowds? I suppose the worst possible thing I could say is that I don't like people, and that crowds are just collections of people. That seems like a very nihilistic way to look at the world.

I'm a firm believe that a man looks his best in a suit and I feel like in the late 40's people just dressed up to do everything.

You can take on the world in a good suit.

I do like to make people cringe. That discomfort, tension, embarrassment, pain - all of those things interest me, and not through some sort of masochistic or sadistic impulse. It illuminates what being a human being is. It taps into what it is to be human more incisively than stuff that's just very pedestrian.

People blush at praise--not only praise of their bodies, but praise of anything that is theirs.

I was at Plaza Athénée, where a jacket and tie was required. Andy Warhol came with his turtleneck, because he was always wearing a turtleneck, with a tie over it, and we gave him a jacket - so he had a jacket and tie over the turtleneck. It was pretty cool.

It's very counterintuitive to boil down something so personal, something that requires privacy. All of a sudden, you open it up to the world and put it in a context where you could easily trivialize what you've done. If people sense that discomfort, they're not wrong.

The rock'n'roll lifestyle really is available to anybody that's got money. Honestly. Once you get money, if you interview a hundred people with money, they'll all sound like rock stars.

Bowie and McCartney arrived, and the biscuits and caviare started and I left immediately. I don't like shouting across rooms, with people in shiny suits who look like used-car salesmen.

In my books, there are a lot of people stuck in rooms. Or, conversely, out in the wide open. It seems that, in a funny way, when people are cooped up in rooms they are freer than when they are wandering about in the world.

What I hate is when you're wearing something and you feel it on your body. I hate that.

I'm putting on a suit and tie when I go see The Great Gatsby.

What is it about silence that makes people uneasy?

It has been remarked (by a lady infinitely cleverer than the present author) how kindly disposed the world in general feels to young people who either die or marry.