highbrow QUOTES

1 " There's no difference between pulp fiction and highbrow fiction, one is as good as the other, the only difference is the aura they have, and that's determined by the people who read the stuff, not by the book itself. There's no such thing as 'the book itself. "

― Karl Ove Knausgård , Min kamp 5 (Min kamp #5)

2 " That life can be a rich place, comprised of the highbrow and the lowdown, the casual and the ambitious, private reading and public sharing. As a parent in that landscape, you'll need to be sometimes traveling companion, sometimes guides, sometimes off in your own part of the forest. A relationship between readers is complicated and cannot be reduced to such " strategies" as mandatory reading aloud, a commendable family activity whose pleasure has been codified into virtue, transforming the nightly bedtime story into a harbinger of everybody's favorite thing: homework. "

3 " [T]he piano was to Harlem what brass bands had been to New Orleans. The instrument represented conflicting possibilities -- a pathway for assimilating traditional highbrow culture, a calling card of lowbrow nightlife, a symbol of middle-class prosperity, or, quite simply, a means of making a living. "

― , The History of Jazz

4 " Thankfully existing only in SMALL pockets within our discipline, is “intellectual” snobbery. It’s a hushed but ugly truth that people are made to feel not worthy to be among a certain set – didn’t attend the right school or don’t have the requisite abbreviations to follow their name. I know what that feels like. Good thing I'm pigheaded, have a bigger vision and committed to my craft, or I would’ve succumbed to it long ago. That is why when I meet an emerging writer who’s serious about developing their craft, I try to encourage them as much as I can. I say IGNORE the highbrow cliques and prove your mettle by growing, accepting balanced feedback and most of all, creating work that will stand the test of time. Period. "

― Sandra Sealy

5 " All literature, highbrow or low, from the Aeneid onward, is fan fiction....Through parody and pastiche, allusion and homage, retelling and reimagining the stories that were told before us and that we have come of age loving--amateurs--we proceed, seeking out the blank places in the map that our favorite writers, in their greatness and negligence, have left for us, hoping to pass on to our own readers--should we be lucky enough to find any--some of the pleasure that we ourselves have taken in the stuff that we love: to get in on the game. All novels are sequels; influence is bliss. "

― Michael Chabon , Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands

6 " Reading Encyclopaedia Britannica is like channel surfing on a very highbrow cable system. "

― A.J. Jacobs , The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World

7 " The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news — things which on their own merits would get the big headlines-being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. 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. "

8 " A highbrow is a person educated beyond his intelligence. "

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

10 " We must teach science in the mother tongue. Otherwise, science will become a highbrow activity. It will not be an activity in which all people can participate. "

11 " What's great about teen fiction is that it's all mixed up - there's highbrow and lowbrow! "

12 " 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. "

13 " 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. "

14 " No highbrow literary type would ever say 'Moby Dick' is good but it's just about a whale, or a Jane Austen would be important if she wasn't just writing about romantic relationships. "