Highbrow Quotes

I don't know what people find or like in me, I'm hopelessly commonplace! ... Current appreciation of my work is a bit "highbrow", I've always considered myself a popular artist. (Maxfield Parrish)

Except for half a dozen in each town the citizens are proud of that achievement of ignorance which is so easy to come by. To be 'intellectual' or 'artistic' or, in their own word, to be 'highbrow,' is to be priggish and of dubious virtue.

Sinclair Lewis

What is a highbrow? He is a man who has found something more interesting than women.

Edgar Wallace

I personally do not write highbrow music. If I do, it's by accident.

Gordon Getty

There's all this stuff that is happening in Edinburgh now, it's a sad attempt to create an Edinburgh society, similar to a London society, a highbrow literature celebrity society.

Irvine Welsh

It would be inaccurate to say that John Fowles is a middlebrow writer who sometimes hopes he is a highbrow: it has never occurred to him to believe otherwise. There is a difference, morally.

Martin Amis

There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea.

Virginia Woolf

There is a big difference between being anti-American and being critical of the United States. Once again: critiques are appropriate and necessary, provided that they rest on facts and address real abuses, real errors and real excesses -- without deliberately losing sight of America's wise decisions, beneficent interventions and salutary policies. But critiques of this kind -- balanced, fair and well-founded are hard to find, except in America herself: in the daily press in weekly news magazines, on television and radio, and in highbrow monthly journals, which are more widely read than their equivalents in Europe.

Jean-François Revel

In other words, the fact that the criterion we happen to use has a fine ancestry of highbrow statistical theorems does not justify its use. Such justification must come from empirical evidence that it works.

Walter A. Shewhart

I focus on popular culture because I focus on those areas where black humanity is most powerfully expressed, where black people have been able to articulate their sense of the world in a profound manner. And I see this primarily in popular culture. Why not in highbrow culture? Because the access has been so difficult. Why not in more academic forms? Because academic exclusion has been the rule for so long for large numbers of black people that black culture, for me, becomes a search for where black people have left their imprint and fundamentally made a difference in terms of how certain art forms are understood. This is currently in popular culture. And it has been primarily in music, religion, visual arts and fashion.

Cornel West

An honest, bold, loyal, and within its limits extremely highbrow attempt to produce through common ownership a society of the Free and Equal, produced a tyrant and a totalitarian state;... (Max Eastman)

I'm not an especially highbrow person, but I have always loved small, quirky, edgy movies.

Diablo Cody

I don't claim that our TV comedies are highbrow in anyway, but I think there's a basis to them, and that's why they're more popular than other TV comedies. There's a basis of truth in them, a gut feeling.

Ade Edmondson

Slashing its way to the finish line, Black Swan is the first ballet movie for highbrow horror fans for whom ballet itself signifies little to nothing. Those of us who know and love ballet can only look on it with a different kind of horror.

James Wolcott

I'm a little bit highbrow and a little bit trashy...That's what I think good storytelling is. If you can lure in an audience and have a good time with them, but also teach them what it's like - to be a person of color, to be poor - that's a success.

Christopher Oscar Peña

I've always been pretty ravenous about pop culture, highbrow and lowbrow.

St. Vincent (musician)

Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

George Orwell

I'm not all that enthralled by show business, and I'm not that much of a highbrow.

Dick Cavett

So my humor, I'd say, comes from a mixture of lowbrow comedy shows and highbrow theater. It's an interesting mix.

Jasper Fforde