Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

I never felt particularly alienated as an English person in America. It doesn't feel culturally like a massive gap to me.

To me it's very obvious there are huge cultural differences between Americans and Canadians. But a lot of what we are is American.

In L.A., like, there's a lot of, like, materialism, and, you know, people who think they're better than each other because of the clothes they wear or how they dress, and in Oakland, it's not like that.

There's no snobbery in me.

I deeply detest social distinction and snobbery, and in that lies my strong aversion to titular honours.

All the people I know have been conditioned by snobbery.

... more snobbish than their English butlers.

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 know places you better speak low if you've been to college. Men will come across the room and cold-deck you if you hold your glass wrong.

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.

People often think of America as a classless society, but, of course, that isn't true. Within immigrant communities, there's an enormous distinction of class, depending on who your parents are, and that kind of thing comes out really quick in things like marriage and interpersonal relationships.

American and French culture are really, really different, but in a way it's funny.

Cecily. This is no time for wearing the shallow mask of manners. When I see a spade I call it a spade. Gwendolen. [Satirically.] I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade. It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different.

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.

I moved from Italy to Oregon in the '80s - sort of like moving to the middle of a "Duck Dynasty" episode, which was massive culture shock to say the least.

Here in the U.S., culture is not that delicious panacea which we Europeans consume in a sacramental mental space and which has its own special columns in the newspapers - and in people's minds. Culture is space, speed, cinema, technology. This culture is authentic, if anything can be said to be authentic.

There are no persons more solicitous about the preservation of rank than those who have no rank at all. Observe the humors of a country christening, and you will find no court in Christendom so ceremonious as the quality of Brentford.

The African, because of the violent differences between what was native and what he was forced to in slavery, developed some of the most complex and complicated ideas about the world imaginable.

Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can’t get into it do that.

We Americans look funny when we're in France because we don't travel, we are fairly un-cultured whereas Europeans go to Africa all the time because it's right there.

Hardly ever can a youth transferred to the society of his betters unlearn the nasality and other vices of speech bred in him by the associations of his growing years. Hardly ever, indeed, no matter how much money there be in his pocket, can he ever learn to dress like a gentleman-born. The merchants offer their wares as eagerly to him as to the veriest swell, but he simply cannot buy the right things.

Sex is the great leveler, taste the great divider.

Yes, etiquette is hypocritical. Yes, it does inhibit children - if you're lucky. But the idea that it's elitist and irrelevant is like saying language is elitist and irrelevant.

I love playing in America. I feel having been there a few times that I "get" America a lot more than I used to. It used to be so strange to me. It takes years to learn how to separate the actual, major, important differences from the superficial differences that aren't essential or crucial.

Obviously there are many, many ways of being an outsider, but having immigrant parents is one of them. For one thing, it makes you a translator: there are all kinds of things that American parents know about life in America ,and about being a kid in America, that non-American parents don't know, and in many cases it falls on the kid to tell them, and also to field questions from Americans about their parents' native country.