D. J. Taylor Quotes

12 Sourced Quotes

Always in England if you had the type of brain that was capable of understanding T.S. Eliot's poetry or Kant's logic, you could be sure of finding large numbers of people who would hate you violently.

D. J. Taylor
The man who most loudly proclaims his lack of snobbishness is most likely to be a snob.

D. J. Taylor
The cultivation of an arbitrary superiority is a vital part of the curious behavioral compound that makes us who we are.

D. J. Taylor
The idea that the nationalist stance is essentially an extreme form of snobbery is a staple of early Victorian travel writing.

D. J. Taylor
Any kind of social existence has its rules, its shibboleths, its unspoken ordnances and prohibitions, and at one level their enforcement is not so much an adherence to a snobideal as an understanding of how life works, an acknowledgement that most people prefer to associate with their peers and are either amused or fretful when taken out of their customary social milieu.

D. J. Taylor
Perhaps the greatest plank in snobbery's defense is to ask what things would be like if it were taken away. Here the consequences would extend far beyond the boundaries of the individual personal myth.

D. J. Taylor
A snob, all the evidence insists, is one who delights in making judgements that are based on arbitrary criteria.

D. J. Taylor
Boulogne out of season is not much of a place. The wind tears in off the sea and sends the masts of the fishing smacks drawn up in the harbor all a-clatter, and, blowing in against the sails hung up for repair in the chandlers' yards, makes the most melancholy sound ever known.

D. J. Taylor
The gillyflowers were blooming in the window boxes, there was a patch of bright green grass growing in the dust before the statue of the shepherd boy, and the old porter had been sufficiently animated by the joys of the season as to take his chair out into the courtyard and read his newspaper in full view of the passing traffic.

D. J. Taylor
'Never be a novelist and a critic,' I was told. 'Never be a novelist and a biographer.' It's actually very good advice and 30 years ago I indeed set out with every intention of just being a novelist. But then I got diverted.

D. J. Taylor
As time went on there were some books that were crying out to be mocked rather than just reviewed, but I would also argue that they are not malicious or mean-spirited. They are meant to be funny, yes, but you have to have made some kind of impression on the world to be parodied, and so it is also a form of cultural authentication.

D. J. Taylor
I could essentially do a week's work in a day and a half which left me time for my writing.

D. J. Taylor