Jose James Quotes

Wine is wonderful stuff. But so many people are put off by the snobbery of it.

If you took some of the behavior that you see in the fashion world and put it anywhere else, it would just be embarrassing.

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 always like to sing barefoot, but when I first started doing these dates with the symphonies, I of course thought I should clean up my act, being a Jewish girl from Long Island with a little bit of a trucker mouth. So I wore a gown and some high heels.

What is called good society is usually nothing but a mosaic of polished caricatures.

A lot of people want to not wear a tie when they go to a restaurant. They feel they don't have to wear a tie. I think it's kind of a statement they're making. I don't know what that statement is. I haven't quite figured that out yet.

The Oxford manner is, alas, indefinable; I was going to say indefensible.

You don't have to conform to a very specific aesthetic today, whereas 1950s women definitely had to.

Civilization is a conspiracy. Modern life is the silent compact of comfortable folk to keep up pretences.

I'm an American searching for some sort of parameters, a way of life - I'm looking for a slight formality, for a place where you can never be overdressed.

For better or ill, I was very heavily influenced by men I knew who always dressed formally.

I lived in a world where social arrangements were taken for granted and assumed to be timeless. A child's obligation was to learn these usages, not to question them. The complexities of racial deportment were of a piece with learning manners and etiquette more generally.

It's possible that you have been told a time or 10 that you don't appreciate how tough your elders had it. It's true that, if you had been coming of age back in, say, 1960, you would probably be feeling more restricted, if only because you were doomed to spend your days in a skirt, nylon stockings and girdle.

If I try and be something I am not, if I try and be cool, and I am not, I am a boring white man in a suit. Usually a pin-striped suit.

When we go to the opera, we put the clothes on we know we must wear for there.

We limit ourselves. We're told to act and behave in certain way from birth.

I was always taught how to dress for the occasion.

We used to wear a track suit and T-shirt while training. But that did not go down well with the villagers, because women are usually supposed to wear salwar kameez.

Manners have been somewhat cynically defined to be a contrivance of wise men to keep fools at a distance. Fashion is shrewd to detect those who do not belong to her train, and seldom wastes her attentions. Society is very swift in its instincts, and if you do not belong to it, resists and sneers at you, or quietly drops you.

Even on the most solemn occasions I got away without wearing socks and hid that lack of civilization in high boots

My father used to say, "Superior people never make long visits, have to be shown Longfellows grave, or the glass flowers at Harvard."

English clubs are very exclusive. I played Royal Foxshire and they made me wear a suit and tie. . . in the shower.

There's this unspoken thing that you have to wear a tux and some kind of nice dress. There are all these ethical rules, but I'm sure if you came to the Oscars in ripped jeans and a t-shirt they wouldn't throw you out. You would just look like a fool.

I got tired of doing battle with people thinking I was a little weird because I wasn't in a band making happy, stilted music. The only people who really seem weird to me are people who think they're normal. People who think it's possible to be normal just by doing the same things that most people do. Is there a most people? I don't know. Television makes it seem like there is, but I think that might just be television.

To seem sorrowful is not in good taste: You're supposed to seem bored.