Cultural Capital Quotes

I haven't been to Berlin Fashion Week before, but it's really on the up. Being an artist as well as a model, I know that the art world is booming here, so it makes sense that fashion would feel that effect, too.

Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier

Children … "inherit" the economic position of their parents primarily through the transmission of human capital.

The whole of Paris is a vast university of Art, Literature and Music... it is worth anyone's while to dally here for years. Paris is a seminar, a post-graduate course in everything.

Sometimes I think of Paris not as a city but as a home.

Rules of taste enforce structures of power.

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.

Hip-hop has been so important in my work, because it speaks to the idea of money being tied to cultural capital in an honest and transparent way. When I was growing up in LA, money was equivalent to class, and it was a passport. Hip-hop emphasizes that, but Hollywood and show business bear it out. If you have money, there really is no barrier to social mobility. There are still social clubs in Newport where you can't get in even if you have money, but that is really rare.

I guess if you have had a good education as opposed to someone who hasn't been to school, you start off on this journey having studied Shakespeare for years and years or studied classics. I suppose why people see this big divide - the boarding school boys getting all the roles - is because they feel like some people have had a head start.

My tax dollar, which goes to New York State Council on the Arts, is by and large only spent to fund people from the state of New York! And you want to be the cultural capital of the world?

The point of my work is to show that culture and education aren't simply hobbies or minor influences. They are hugely important in the affirmation of differences between groups and social classes and in the reproduction of those differences.

Content that's generated out of America, whether it be film or music, has, in my opinion, much greater impact in sustaining our credibility and our place as a cultural capital. This is our great export.

When I first started coming to New York in the early Nineties and seeing the vitality of the programme compared to what was going on back in London or Paris, it was just in a different league. It's like a 16th-century court.

I've read Proust and Stendhal. That keeps you in your place.

[On Paris:] A city never entirely known, yet which gives you the feeling of intimacy, of possessing it intimately.

My parents both had Oxford degrees, they read important books, spoke foreign languages, drank real coffee and went to museums for pleasure. People like that don't have fat kids: they were cut out to be winners and winners don't have children who are overweight.

Class is much more than Marx's definition of relationship to the means of production. Class involved your behavior, your basic assumptions, how you are taught to behave, what you expect from yourself and from others, your concept of a future, how you understand problems and solve them, how you think, feel, act.

A status symbol is a book. A very easy book to read is The Catcher in the Rye. Walk around with that under your arm, kids. That is status.

The profession is never going back to those days when a handful of wealthy people treated publishing like a hobby: one where the business can lose money because the family has lots of it to burn. Frankly, I don't think that model was ever sustainable, and it really only enriched a small number of writers.

The wealthy are always surrounded by hangers-on; science and art are as well.

Paris is a mighty schoolmaster, a grand enlightener of the provincial intellect.

In Europe, people in the arts are considered part of the intelligentsia; they are considered part of the elite.

Poor people have big TV's. Rich people have big libraries.

every human activity, whether it be love, philosophy, art, or revolution, is carried on with a special intensity in Paris.

I think that New York is not the cultural centre of America, but the business and administrative centre of American culture.