Jesse Ball Quotes

The difference between being a rich guy in America and a rich guy in Europe is that in America people look up to you for being rich.

I'm a realist about who really reads books and who acts like they read books.

I've spent most of my adult life in the United States, and there the celebrity culture has been entrenched for a long time. It has made people almost literally insane, even those who make a great show of repudiating it. Those people, like novelists, who can no longer enjoy this status are condemned to despise it.

As soon as I find myself in the presence of a rich man, I cannot help looking upon him as an exceptional and beautiful being, as a sort of marvellous divinity, and, in spite of myself, surmounting my will and my reason, I feel rising, from the depths of my being, toward this rich man, who is very often an imbecile, and sometimes a murderer, something like an incense of admiration. Is it not stupid? And why? Why?

He who meanly admires a mean thing is a snob--perhaps that is a safe definition of the character.

He who meanly admires mean things is a Snob.

Most women you know are very much interested in the man who is reputed to be deeply admired by other women.

Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.

We can always make ourselves liked provided we act likable, but we cannot always make ourselves esteemed, no matter what our merits are.

No difference exists between American and European manners. A proletarian from Chicago can be just as Philistine as an English duke.

Pay enough for anything and it passes for taste.

To get away well is so very much! And to get away well is often so very difficult!

I think Americans love success - but hate the people who have it.

That is a society editor, sitting there elegantly dressed, with his legs crossed in that indolent way, observing the clothes the ladies wear, so that he can describe them for his paper and make them out finer than they are and get bribes for it and become wealthy.

There is no country in which so absolute a homage is paid to wealth. In America there is a touch of shame when a man exhibits theevidences of large property, as if after all it needed apology. But the Englishman has pure pride in his wealth, and esteems it a final certificate. A coarse logic rules throughout all English souls: if you have merit, can you not show it by your good clothes and coach and horses?

Saying "muff" to someone and trying to be romantic is incredibly difficult.

The poor yield to the rich, the common people to the upper ten, the servants to their masters, the ignorant to the scholars; but there is nobody who does not imagine that he is really better than others.

I'd put Hank Williams picture on one hundred dollar bills.

In London there was no home cooking worthy of the name. When you were in funds you ate out. But only the people whose faces appeared in such publications as Town and Queen could afford to eat in restaurants serving food which would leave them looking and feeling better instead of worse.

Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult. Even with no motive to be false, it is very hard to say the exact truth.

Silence is difficult and arduous, it is not to be played with.

[Being unique] gives so much privilege to people who can make it, rather than having some moral and aesthetic discussions.

About this business of being a gentleman: I paid so heavily for the fourteen years of my gentleman's education that I feel entitled, now and then, to get some sort of return.

I have realized that part of being Dauntless is being willing to make things more difficult for yourself in order to be self-sufficient.

Riches attract attention, consideration, and congratulations of mankind.