Chloe Sevigny Quotes

I'm not posh or common, I'm in between.

My wife thinks I have an obsession with social class. So I guess I have an obsession with social class. It probably stems from feeling like an outcast.

All the people I know have been conditioned by snobbery.

I had an Edinburgh, middle-class childhood and a public school education.

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.

You're a socialite because you're born into it. That's not what I want.

I do speak well as I went to a posh school. But I come from no real breeding.

I come from an Irish working-class background but went to a posh school, and any type of pretension was quickly mocked at home. I've always had a keen eye for pretension.

At first, I didn't hang out with celebrity kids. That wasn't the way I was brought up. I went to a run-of-the-mill Catholic primary school when we first moved to L.A. But then I went to a high school where there were lots of 'industry' children. Those weren't my best friends and I've never set out to make myself a part of that scene.

The bourgeois are other people.

You can't not have feelings about country clubs, whichever side you're on.

Language does not make one an elite.

I've got to be high class... Which is sad, because I like bars.

Americans sometimes say to me that they have no class system themselves. All human beings have class systems. It can be based on a different thing in a different country, but the thing about breeding is, you can't buy it. You can't buy class.

There was a time when formal clothes were one of life's great pleasures, as well as a way of describing instantly a man's status wealth. Toffs wore the most, the proles the least. Fast forward to 2008 and clothes are still an unrivalled pleasure but some men - and this includes many of our betters - have confused status with fake informality.

Class is more important than a game.

As I look back now I can see that I was a perfect little aristocrat.

I don't care where you went to school. There - have I made your day? No? All right, I'll go further: I also don't care what your dad did for a living or how your mum voted. Nor do I mind whether you ate your tea in front of the telly, dinner at the kitchen table, or supper in the dining room.

In all my novels, a sense of place - not just geographic but social - is a critical element. I have always been drawn to the novels of Edith Wharton, among others, where social dynamics are crucial. Wharton's class consciousness fascinates me, and some of the tension in my books stems from that.

In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors.

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.

Class has always been Tom Wolfe's subject, and I suspect the reason for much of the disfavor in which he is held.

People assume that I'm an aristocrat, but I don't really feel part of any class.

I learned early that class is universally admired.

Self-examination - when the whole world around you is pressuring that and challenging you - is very, very hard. Looking at a whole structure - in my case, let us say of snobbery, basking in certain privileges, marks of what appear to be superiority - that's ugly to look at.