He's just intelligent-sort of a nerd, actually. He's the only brother I know who made a 1420 on the SAT. I don't think Chris Dudley did that, and Mr. Smarty Pants went to Yale. Kobe doesn't hang out. He doesn't go to the clubs. He doesn't ride around. He doesn't put rims on his car. He's just him. He's a sophisticated kid. Damn mature for his age.
I guess I'm interested in people who are very sophisticated in intellectual ways, while being completely off the mark in emotional ones, with these huge blind spots in terms of their own behavior.
Why should we expect modernist taste to be any smarter than premodernist or postmodernist?
I think teenagers bring a lot of intellectual sophistication. They're wrestling with big questions. It's just that, a lot of times they do that separately from adults.
I certainly consider a great appreciation of painting to be the best indication of a most perfect mind.
Knowledge is the only elegance.
The bookshelf, like the book, has become an integral part of civilization as we know it, its presence in a home practically defining what it means to be civilized, educated, and refined.
The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication - this "nerdification," to put it bluntly - is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally.
Hannibal Lecter: We live in a primitive time - don't we, Will? - neither savage nor wise. Half measures are the curse of it. Any rational society would either kill me or give me my books.
The intellectually sophisticated person is indifferent to all genuine individuality, because relationships and reactions result from it which cannot be exhausted with logical operations.
That afternoon I came to understand that one of the deepest purposes of intellectual sophistication is to provide distance between us and our most disturbing personal truths and gnawing fears.
