Ian Mcewan Quotes

The true snob never rests; there is always a higher goal to attain, and there are, by the same token, always more and more people to look down upon.

There's no snobbery in me.

Snobbery, being an aspiring failing, is sometimes the prophecy of better things.

The uncouth hordes of common men are not fit to recognize duly the merits of those who eclipse their own wretchedness.

One of the surest signs of the Philistine is his reverence for the superior tastes of those who put him down.

We're a phenomenally snobby society, and it's such a rich seam. The middle class is so funny: it's the class I know best, and it's the class where you find the most pretension, so that's what makes the middle classes so funny.

In England, literary pretence is more universal than elsewhere from our method of education.

The most accomplished way of using books is to serve them as some people do lords; learn their titles and then brag of their acquaintance.

I know of no sentence that can induce such immediate and brazen lying as the one that begins, 'Have you read - .'

I'm attacking the pomposity that says this is more valuable than that. I'm sick of that.

All the people I know have been conditioned by snobbery.

It's the time of year when the literati give advice on what we should be reading on our summer holidays. These terrifying lists often leave me appalled at my own ignorance, but also suspicious about the pretension of their advocates.

The intelligent are to the intelligentsia what a gentleman is to a gent.

I'm responsible for starting a whole new school of pretension.

I come from a very la-ti-da East Coast intellectual family - or so they think.

No social class, intellectual category or art form is immune to the snob virus.

At college - I went to Yale, and everybody's very smart, and everybody has their thing that makes them special, and people at Yale would pretend they didn't recognize me. Only after they'd had a couple of drinks would they start singing the 'Life Goes On' theme song.

It makes me sad there is still some intellectual snobbery out there.

There is no good in living in a society where you are merely the equal of everybody else. The true pleasure of life is to live with your inferiors.

Old among the young, poor among the rich, I adopt an air of indefinable superiority.

Pedants, who have the least knowledge to be proud of, are impelled most by vanity.

The Stately Homes of England, How beautiful they stand, To prove the Upper Classes, Have still the Upper Hand.

Snobbery is not merely a silly human weakness but something basic in the mentality of modern man-a symptom which reflects the general sickness, the dislocation of social and cultural values in contemporary civilization.

The small town smart set is deadly serious about its smartness.

He who meanly admires mean things is a Snob.