Tom Wolfe Quotes

I don't understand all about New York society. It's only when they are in trouble that I'm really interested.

Being a posh actor in England you cannot escape the class-typing from whatever side you look at it.

Whether you like the look or not, that tailcoat is a tough shell, a suit of armour. The posh boy is a hardy species.

These families, you know, are our upper crust, not upper ten thousand.

Having gone to a public school, I thought I knew about posh people. But I didn't know anything until I went to Oxford.

In order to acquire a growing and lasting respect in society, it is a good thing, if you possess great talent, to give, early in your youth, a very hard kick to the right shin of the society that you love. After that, be a snob.

It is impossible, in our condition of Society, not to be sometimes a Snob.

The biggest crime in England is to rise above your station. It's fine to be a pop star. 'Oh, it's great, lots of fun, aren't they sweet, these pop stars! But to think you have anything to say about how the world should work? What arrogance!'

I didn't want to look distinguished; I wanted to look fun, and also to fade into the street, into the King's Road. If I don't fade into a room at White's, that's fine. My father was chairman of Brooks' and the Beefsteak, and I was brought up in that life, and it bores me rigid.

At present there is no distinction among the upper ten thousand of the city.

We didn't do cotillions or anything. My family made fun of the pageants.

I think poshness is very funny! But I think it's also delightful. There's something wonderful and very innocent about it, particularly with the Edwardians.

The more backwoodish a social group, juvenile or adult, the stricter its conception of the normal, and the readier it will ridicule any departure from it.

Conservatism, being an upper-class characteristic, is decorous; and conversely, innovation, being a lower-class phenomenon, is vulgar. ...Innovation is bad form.

The aristocracy most widely developed in America is that of wealth.

Lyall had spent centuries nibbling about the great layered cake that was polite society while Lord Akeldama acted the part of the frosting on its top.

We live in a world that tells us not to care, to consume everything in sight. It tells us that being cool and being an individual actually means buying what everyone else is buying and doing what everyone else is doing.

No real English gentleman, in his secret soul, was ever sorry for the death of a political economist.

The decisive moment in the defeat of upper class, capital-S, Society may have come when, in newspapers all over the nation, what used to be call the Society page was replaced by the Style section.

It's the weird thing Eton does - you're at school next to lords and earls and, in my case, Prince William, so you end up being used to dealing with those sorts of people.

No matter how irrelevant social class now is, even the most eager egalitarian must be quietly proud that the posh English rose is still an industry standard for peerlessly sophisticated beauty.

Our Puritan forefathers, though bitterly denouncing all forms and ceremonies, were great respecters of persons; and in nothing was the regard for wealth and position more fully shown than in designating the seat in which each person should sit during public worship.

Academic and aristocratic people live in such an uncommon atmosphere that common sense can rarely reach them.

The enemy of society is middle class and the enemy of life is middle age.

I intended to be one of the governing class.