Parker Posey Quotes

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!'

Yes, I was slightly outside everything when I was growing up. My mother jokes that I was exchanged at birth. She brought us up to have traditional values. She was absolutely not part of the '60s generation.

I know places you better speak low if you've been to college. Men will come across the room and cold-deck you if you hold your glass wrong.

Yeah, it is particularly upsetting to be called, whatever it was, sneery, or a snob, given the background I have.

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.

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

Somewhere, I had received the impression that Fine Folks were people who did the best they could with the sense they had, but Aunt Alexandra was of the opinion, obliquely expressed, that the longer a family had been squatting on one patch of land the finer it was.

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.

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

May not the complaint, that common people are above their station, often take its rise in the fact of uncommon people being below theirs?

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.

I had been in a film, playing a young British aristocrat. My wife told me that she was invited to a dinner and she invited me to dinner and the hostess had seen me and said, 'You cannot bring him.' but I think that I've done enough to shatter the image.

I grew up in an average middle-class family. I don't think I even knew any friends who were fostered or adopted.

Americans who have parents raised during the Great Depression or World War II understand how drastically things have changed on the home front. My father did not care a whit whether I liked him, and it would have been unthinkable for him to pick up my stuff. There were rules in the house, and they were enforced.

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

It is, of course, the first recourse of every elitist to see social barbarism in others.

I'm considered homophobic and crazy about these things and old fashioned. But I think that the family - father, mother, children - is fundamental to our civilisation.

I grew up in a conservative household. That was the life of the time in Egypt: a conservative, middle-class household.

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

By vulgarity I mean that vice of civilization which makes man ashamed of himself and his next of kin, and pretend to be somebody else.

None of my sisters are in the movies, nor are my nieces going to be. That's how Dutt 'sahab,' my dad, brought up the girls in the family, and I am just carrying his thought forward.

My parents came from different backgrounds. My father's was grander than my mother's, so my mother had... to put up with the disapproval of my father's relations.

I certainly never get above my station - my family would soon slap me back down to earth.

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.

I don't believe in social equality, and they know it.