Cleveland Amory Quotes

When the Negro musician or dancer swings the blues, he is fulfilling the same fundamental existential requirement that determines the mission of the poet, the priest and the medicine man.

Art is all about the experience. I could say I don't really relate to opera, but then you watch Placido Domingo, and you go, 'Blimey, look at that.'

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.

I am not a socialite, though I seem to have got the reputation for being one. I have some very good friends who happen to be in so-called Society; but Society as such is a bore and holds no fascination for me.

I know that the arts are important. I'm not denying that, but I can't associate myself with all the claptrap that goes on around it.

We had a certain kind of really big prestige among, I suppose not just intellectual folk, but a sort of nice middle class intelligent folk of a very urban nature.

Great music was written by the great geniuses, and you want to do it justice.

Wherever and whenever I sing, if there is only one spiritual on a program, people will talk about two things afterward, and one of them will be the spiritual. What I bring to this is the best of my classical training - not all of it. I apply what is appropriate.

It's rather like attending a university seminar where you are talking to a few gifted specialists who deliver a paper to an audience of their peers. That's one way of making music.

With its fluctuating forms and needless decoration, fashion epitomizes the supposedly unproductive waste that inspired 20th-century technocrats to dream of central planning. It exists for no good reason. But that's practically a definition of art.

I wish someone would ask me to design a cathedral.

Opera is given so little attention in the national press.

I've always said that music is like literature.

Going to the opera, like getting drunk, is a sin that carries its own punishment with it.

A love of classical music is only partially a natural response to hearing the works performed, it also must come about by a decision to listen carefully, to pay close attention, a decision inevitably motivated by the cultural and social prestige of the art.

People are proud of their tattoos. It's like a modern coat of arms.

Music is a reservoir... of sounds.

Acting has been gentrified. It's become part of the bourgeoisie. But there was a time when it would be a great scandal if you announced you were going to be an actor.

I think opera has gained a kind of glamorous appeal. It's a live performance that aligns all of the arts, and when it is represented in the media, in film in particular, it is presented as something that is really a special event, whether it's a great date or something that's just hugely romantic.

Many Indians turned to the gun for the same reason as did some Europeans: the prestige attached to them. Indians, like many members of the European elite, owned guns not simply because they served a function but as a symbol of power and wealth

I think the art world heightens the intensity of desires for inclusion, and the humiliations of exclusion, which is why it's a great place to circulate when you are in the lucky position, as I am, of not wanting or needing anything from anyone.

Art is the job of the privileged.

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

I have concluded that Literature is no proper pursuit for a gentleman and that Writing ought never to be consider'd but as an elegant Accomplishment to be indulg'd in with infrequency and Discrimination.

I actually want to write a treatise in defence of pretension. I think the word 'pretension' has become like the word 'ironic' - just this catch-all term to distance people from interesting experiences and cultural engagement and possible embarrassment.