Sue Grafton Quotes

I believe in status symbols.

Money doesn't buy class.

Today is truly the Golden Age: gold buys hornor, gold procures love

Fashion is nothing more than the temporary custom of rich and idle people who make it their principal business to study the external elegance of life.

Men who could willingly resign the luxuries and sensual pleasures of a large fortune cannot consent to live without the grandeur and the homage.

I grew up poor and used to look at people in big houses and thought they had everything. Then, later on, I looked at models in magazines and thought they had it all. When you have the ability to live that life, to some extent you find out that they don't have any magic cure for everything.

With the greater part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches.

Style has replaced elegance. Before, I believed that style is something a person embodied. But now it's so easy to buy good style if you have the money.

Unfortunately, some people go to a restaurant, and they aren't really there to enjoy themselves. They're there because they think they deserve to be there or because they can just afford it.

You don't buy luxury to enter a community, but to set yourself apart from others.

I photograph wealth.

The vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.

I don't care what anyone says. Being rich is a good thing.

The higher a man stands, the more the word vulgar becomes unintelligible to him.

Frugality is for the vulgar.

We judge of entire nations by the productions of a few mechanical arts, and think we are talking of men, while we are boasting of their estates, their dress, and their palaces. The sense in which we apply the terms, great, and noble, high rank, and high life, show, that we have, on such occasions, transferred the idea of perfection from the character to the equipage; and that excellence itself is, in our esteem, a mere pageant, adorned at a great expense, by the labors of many workmen.

People treated others crassly, looked down on the poor, and adored the rich

I do this work, but I am uncomfortable in situations where you're hyped into something you're not. Just because you're in a long limo doesn't mean anything.

The super-rich watch each other like envious owls, to see who's got a slightly better loafer, a pullover made from some even more absurdly endangered fur. They will go to any lengths to find the best tailors.

When I was growing up, we were in a high income bracket, one of the highest. I was one of the first in high school to get a car. And I didn't have to wait for it to be a graduation present, either. We've probably got one of the nicest houses in Sacramento.

Luxury is not a $4,000 T-shirt - that's just an expensive item, the same as if a can of Coca-Cola cost $5,000.

The Gandhi family is a pampered lot. They have only dealt with people at their beck and call.

I think the pearls - one is a necklace, and another you have five hundred pounds of pearls, which may be one million pearls in a bowl - really show a kind of [society] condition.

It's very important when making a friend to check and see if they have a private plane. People think a good personality trait in a friend is kindness or a sense of humor. No, in a friend a good personality trait is a Gulfstream.

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?