Quotes & Sayings About Bohemian

I had a very artistic bohemian childhood. My father was an actor and a mime. — Vonda Shepard

A few years ago, if you had told me I'd be moving back to Glasgow I'd have said, 'No way'. But it's changed. It's much more vibrant, bohemian. But I'm 35 and I've become a bit of a homebody, I don't really go out much. Same in New York. My home could be anywhere but I love Glasgow. — Kelly Macdonald

The bohemian life that reigned in Paris until the end of the '50s is gone. The artists had more time to think, to reflect; success didn't come so suddenly. — Pontus Hulten

She was feeling her bohemian oats. — Steve Martin

Frederick Ward thought novels immoral and had been known to leave the room rather than subject himself to "bohemian" opinions. — Donald McCaig

We are all a little bit hippy, a little bohemian. We take that from the culture we knew, from the '70s and the '80s. — Nicolas Maduro

Fandango was around before the Internet. Fandango is a Spanish-American dance. It's a lively tempo dance. It's almost like the tango. That's what it says in the Merriam-Webster [dictionary]. The second entry is [defined as] 'tomfoolery.' That's what it says in the dictionary, that's what I go by. I remember Queen saying it too on 'Bohemian Rhapsody.' When I was little I never understood what they meant by 'do the fandango. — DJ Quik

As recently as the grunge era, there remained a bohemian cachet in casually mentioning that you didn't own a TV. But nobody thinks like that anymore. Today, claiming you don't own a TV simply means you're poor (or maybe depressed). In one ten-year span, high-end television usurped the cultural positions of film, rock, and literary fiction. — Chuck Klosterman

My parents are a wonderful mixture of bohemian eccentric, but also incredibly practical and not airy-fairy. — Sophie Kennedy Clark

Chess is my profession. I am my own boss; I am free. I like literature and music, classical especially. I am in fact quite normal; I have a Bohemian profession without being myself a Bohemian. I am neither a conformist nor a great revolutionary. — Bent Larsen

Hollis thought he looked like William Burroughs, minus the bohemian substrate (or perhaps the methadone). Like someone who'd be invited quail shooting with the vice-president, though too careful to get himself shot. — William Gibson

I was a well-educated young lady from Boston with a thirst for bohemian counterculture and no clear plan. But I had no idea what to do with all my pent-up longing for adventure, or how to make my eagerness to take risks productive. — Piper Kerman

Ultimately, the salon, Steffens noted, helped change the public perception of Greenwich Village, although hardly in the manner Dodge had hoped. What had been a neighborhood better known for cheap rents and no shortage of decrepit apartments was becoming almost chic, a kind of Latin Quarter in Manhattan. Small theaters and art galleries sprang up, and midtown shoppers and tourists took the time to cruise through the Village for a look at the new trendsetters. Steffens did not recall it as being exceptionally fashionable back in 1911, judging his own lifestyle to be "Bohemian, but not the fake sort." If it was not fake, it was hardly genuine, either. Steffens was not about to starve in Greenwich Village. — Peter Hartshorn

It is the Bohemian fad to expatriate himself, to seek strange and bizarre environments. As soon as a place begins to attract civilization he flees it for some new hiding place. When he chooses a Chinese dinner he must have a restaurant where no white man has ever before trod, if he can find one. . . . As soon as others begin to frequent it also, again he flies.27 — Andrew Coe

Art can help a town by attracting a certain Bohemian population that adds life to the bars, character to the streets and a buzz to the name. Employers may then follow. But art can't do much if every town does it. There aren't enough Bohemians. — Evan Davis

I am a bohemian person. I don't speak German, and I live in a foreign country where all the signs are in German. I did that deliberately. I'm like a ghost. Look at how much media and advertising you're subjected to, this mindless chatter of advertising. I just block it out so effortlessly because it's all a foreign language to me. It's really a good thing for my head, living in Berlin. — Anton Newcombe

I had become a kind of information magpie, gathering to myself all manner of shiny scraps of fact and hokum and books and art-history and politics and music and film, and developing, too, a certain skill in manipulating and arranging these pitiful shards so that they glittered and caught the light. Fool's gold, or priceless nuggets mined from my singular childhood's rich bohemian seam? I leave it to others to decide. — Salman Rushdie

Yet that which is above all this, the favour and the love of Heaven, we have great argument to think in a peculiar manner propitious and propending towards us. Why else was this nation chosen before any other, that out of her, as out of Sion, should be proclaimed and sounded forth the first tidings and trumpet of Reformation to all Europe? And had it not been the obstinate perverseness of our prelates against the divine and admirable spirit of Wickliff, to suppress him as a schismatic and innovator, perhaps neither the Bohemian Huns and Jerome, no nor the name of Luther or of Calvin, had been ever known: the glory of reforming all our neighbours had been completely ours. — John Milton

One good thing about a good book or a good film, or maybe even a song, I'm not a musician but I love to listen to music, is the range that each piece is able to give you. Like 'Bohemian Rhapsody' by Queen, 1975, that song is so epic. It goes in so many different places, it's and opera and it is heavy metal, and it's so crazy as it goes every which way. I kind of like films like that. — Kleber Mendonca Filho

Modelling opened up the world to me. All my friends were bohemian artists and were a little bit appalled when I sold out and did something so bourgeois. I'd say, 'Come on, guys, with what I earn from this job, we can all go to Morocco.' — Christie Brinkley

The theological difference between the Civilized and the Bohemian Terrorists lies in the fact that the former seek spiritual (i.e., remote) mortification while the latter are after the physical (i.e., local) mortification; both -as a consequence thereof- have been promised by their Lord to be given that what they aspire to and hell is their everlasting abode. — Ibrahim Ibrahim

Fifty years ago, it was the dream of every bohemian artist to be seen getting out of a limousine wearing blue jeans and sneakers. Today, it's the dream of probably half the people in the country. — Brad Holland

Naturally, she had enemies. Her success, her sex, her racial origin and her bohemian extravagance reminded the puritanical why actors used to be buried in unhallowed ground. And over the decades her acting style, once so original, inevitably dated, since naturalness onstage is just as much an artifice as naturalism in the novel. If the magic always worked for some - Ellen Terry called her "transparent as an azalea" and compared her stage presence to "smoke from a burning paper" - others were less kind. Turgenev, though a Francophile and himself a dramatist, found her "false, cold, affected," and condemned her "repulsive Parisian chic. — Julian Barnes

Brecht was a cynical bohemian bogey of the middle classes, but also much more than a mere provocateur. He developed and dramatized his political knowledge in remarkable ways, and was an outspoken, radical opponent of the war, its nationalism and its capitalism — Harold Bloom

The paper was made in Bohemia," I said. "Precisely. And the man who wrote the note is a German. Do you note the peculiar construction of the sentence - 'This account of you we have from all quarters received.' A Frenchman or Russian could not have written that. It is the German who is so uncourteous to his verbs. It only remains, therefore, to discover what is wanted by this German who writes upon Bohemian paper and prefers wearing a mask to showing his face. And here he comes, if I am not mistaken, to resolve all our doubts. — Arthur Conan Doyle

Bohemian - a respectable sort of tramp. — L.M. Montgomery

Money makes people bold and cosmopolitan; if you are poor, you are naturally conservative. It's not easy to be a bohemian when you have to worry about what is going to happen with you and with your next paycheck. — Antonio Munoz Molina

I am deeply sensitive to the spell of nationalism. I can play about thirty Bohemian folk songs ... on my mouth-organ. My oldest friend, who is Czech and a patriot, cannot bear to hear me play them because he says I do it in such a schmalzy way, 'crying into the mouth organ'. I do not think I could have written the book on nationalism which I did write, were I not capable of crying, with the help of a little alcohol, over folk songs, which happen to be my favourite form of music. — Ernest Gellner

My look is a Modern Bohemian type thing. — Frances Bean Cobain

I'm certainly no bohemian hippie, and I do love luxury. — Johnny McDaid

He felt ugly, loathsome, unfit to live, existing from moment to moment like an addict. He gravitated to the crippled, the diseased, the bohemian, and the downtrodden when he wanted an evening of conversation, just a little cerebral companionship. — Anne Rice

Comfort and security are all well and good, but not at the cost of liberty, love and lustiness. The Bohemian knows that money, property and status have little to do with the content of one's character, and that professional success and widespread celebration have little to do with talent. Of value to the Bohemian is spiritual integrity and creative freedom. The Bohemian would sooner live in poverty than submit to an undesirable job. — Robert Wringham

I changed the course of my life, from the rigidity of mathematics and the corporate rhythm to a more bohemian world. — Andrea Hirata

Other people look at me and think: That poor woman; she has a child with a disability. But all I see when I look at you is that girl who had memorized all the words to Queen's 'Bohemian Rhapsody' by the time she was three, the girl who crawls into bed with me whenever there's a thunderstorm - not because you're afraid but because I am, the girl whose laugh has always vibrated inside my own body like a tuning fork. I would never have wished for an able-bodied child, because that child would have been someone who wasn't you. — Jodi Picoult

Ginsberg was the favourite bohemian poet of straight college boys who wanted to transgress, and of gay college boys who were not yet ready to come out. — Christopher Bram

When you're choosing furniture for your home that's supposed to express who you are, what you are also saying is you want other people to infer what you want them to infer. What if they see something different? Wouldn't it be really depressing if you're trying to be bohemian and instead they see you as Rush Limbaugh? — Sheena Iyengar

Wilde stepped off the train in Oakland wearing a Spanish sombrero, a velvet suit, a puce cravat, yellow gloves, and buckled shoes, and wended his way across the bay to the Bohemian Club, where he is reported to have drunk his hosts under the table. — Kevin Starr

Growing up, I'd already decided I wanted to be a beatnik. A Bohemian poet, I thought. Or a musician. Maybe an artist. I'd dress in black turtlenecks and smoke Gitanes. I'd listen to cool jazz in clubs, getting up to read devastating truths from my notebook, leaning against the microphone, cigarette dangling from my hand. — Charles De Lint

I don't really live the bohemian life. I come to work in Midtown everyday, along with all the work-a-day folk. — Wade Guyton

She was born to be free, let her run wild in her own way and you will never lose her. — Nikki Rowe

I like to dress pretty basic during the day, but with a sophisticated bohemian spin, and sometimes a little rock chic. At night I like to go glamorous. — Alessandra Ambrosio

Long hair is considered bohemian, which may be why I grew it, but I keep it long because I love the way it feels, part cloak, part fan, part mane, part security blanket. — Marge Piercy

Cosette was not very timid by nature. There flowed in her veins some of the blood of the bohemian and the adventuress who runs barefoot. It will be remembered that she was more of a lark than a dove. There was a foundation of wildness and bravery in her — Victor Hugo

But she's the kind that won't be downed easily. She'll work all day and go to a Bohemian wedding and dance all night, and drive the hay wagon for a cross man next morning. — Willa Cather

The most abiding memory of visiting Lucian Freud's studio were his eyes, with the gimlet gaze of a Hooded Falcon. But he made for very relaxing company, quick to be amused at the world and his own peccadilloes. He enjoyed the seedy squalor of his rooms in a posh house in the most desirable part of Holland Park, and living up to his persona as an oddball bohemian. — Charles Saatchi

I thought I'd be living a much more bohemian life and be very poor. I never thought I'd do comedy or be married living in the suburbs. Every time I try to plan my life out it just doesn't come to pass, and I think that's a great experience. — Michael Ian Black

When I was in my late 30s, I lit a figure on fire on Baker Beach in San Francisco. It was me, a friend, and maybe eight people, tops. There wasn't any premeditation to it at all. It was really just a product of San Franciscan bohemian milieu. — Larry Harvey

I was always with a single mom, and we never had schedules or anything. We were just Bohemian, us against the world, which was kind of great, but it certainly didn't breed security. I've gotten hyper-sensitive to schedules and bath time and eating at the dinner table. We don't just 'Bohemian' go out at nine o'clock and go get Chinese food. — Brooke Shields

I've spent a lot of time being bohemian and sleeping on floors, but eventually I want to have kids and I want to bring them up in a secure environment. — Paloma Faith

It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on. — Jack Kerouac

Holmes, who loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in Baker Street, buried among his old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition, the drowsiness of the drug, and the fierce energy of his own keen nature. — Arthur Conan Doyle

My dad has always been the bohemian ... — Leonardo DiCaprio

I would describe my aesthetic as definitely personal and harmonious with an eclectic yet bohemian sensibility. — Lisa Marie Presley

When I talk about my artist parents, people imagine a bohemian environment and think, 'Aha, so that's where he gets it from!' But we were as white, straight, and middle-class as the next family on our white, straight, middle-class housing estate. — David Mitchell

All this "confusion" came to an end twenty years after the Royal Visit, when two Bohemian brothers, claiming to be the illegitimate grandsons of Prince Charlie himself, appeared on the scene with their own tartan pattern book, portentously titled Vestiarum Scoticum. James and Charles Sobieski Stuart, as they called themselves, had selected seventy-five different setts, each linked to a specific clan, from a sixteenth-century manuscript they claimed had once belonged to Mary Queen of Scots's father confessor - although they could never quite produce the manuscript when others asked to see it. — Arthur Herman

When I arrived to study at Oxford in October 1963, the bohemian style was black plastic or leather jackets for women and black leather or navy donkey jackets for men. I stuck to cavalry twills and a duffle coat, at least for a few months. — Tariq Ali

Whether important policy decisions are made at Bohemian Grove or not,
it is at the very least disturbing to know that our leaders are gathering together
to worship a massive owl, dress in robes, and recite occult incantations. — Donald Jeffries

I make body chains that come from the neck, cross in the middle of your chest, then go around your waist. I mix them with feathers for a gypsy, bohemian style. — Sofia Boutella

I used to be frustrated about being called bohemian, but I don't really care now. If that's what you are, you should celebrate it. — Alice Temperley

I realised the bohemian life was not for me. I would look around at my friends, living like starving artists, and wonder, 'Where's the art?' They weren't doing anything. And there was so much interesting stuff to do, so much fun to be had ... maybe I could even quit renting. — P. J. O'Rourke

I was constantly being around artists and Bohemian types. — Spencer Dryden

If you've led a rather bohemian and rackety life, as I have, it's precisely the cancer that you'd expect to get. That's a bit of a yawn. — Christopher Hitchens

I was somewhat out of place among my classmates; I could not be as bohemian as they were. — Erno Rubik

Channel a bohemian state of mind with an effortless dress paired with a must have embroidered moto jacket. — Lubov Azria

Without sounding too pretentious, I was sort of a slave to the narrative. When the narrative cracks in, I have to go where it takes me. I had to go to the Bohemian Grove. It was the obvious end to the book. — Jon Ronson

The trouble with fashions is you want to fuck the women in their fashions but when the time comes they always take them off so they don't get wrinkled.
Face it, the really great fucks in a man's life was when there was no time to take yr clothes off, you were too hot and she was too hot - none of yr Bohemian leisure, this was middleclass explosions against snowbanks, against walls of shithouses in attics, on sudden couches in the lobby -
Talk about yr hot peace. — Jack Kerouac

There's this whole post-modern, nuevo beatnik, retro-bohemian thing going on, you know what I mean? You walk into some coffee shops, and it feels like you're an ex-patriot in Paris in the 20s. You're like, 'Hey, isn't that a young Ernest Hemingway over there? Yeah, I think it is! Hey, let's go have a look and see what he's writing ... It's a Gap application.' — Marc Maron

I'm a girl from a good family who was very well brought up. One day I turned my back on it all and became a bohemian. — Brigitte Bardot

They saw themselves as rear-guard individualists, making a last-ditch stand against the twentieth century. They gave thanks loudly from morn till eve that they had escaped the soul
destroying commercialism of the city. They were tacky and cheerful and defiantly bohemian, tirelessly inquisitive about each other's doings, and boundlessly tolerant. When they fought, at least it was with fists and bottles and furniture, not lawyers. — Christopher Isherwood

The idea of trust-fund guys who live in Brooklyn in their 30s is really interesting to me. There's a time and a place where that kind of bohemian lifestyle is appropriate, soon after college, in your 20s. But there are people still living that many years later; they haven't evolved to the next phase. — Tim Heidecker

She thought of Robbie at dinner when there had been something manic and glazed in his look. Might he be smoking the reefers she had read about in a magazine, these cigarettes that drove young men of bohemian inclination across the borders of insanity? — Ian McEwan

I wasn't a hippie and I wasn't even a bohemian. I was extremely earnest and serious. — Jane Fonda

I urge you to sit with yourself for 5 minutes and pour your heart out, ask yourself the serious questions ~ not the day to day duties we get caught up in. I can assure you, the 5 minutes spent reflecting on the life you have lived and how much more you're yet to achieve will spark something in you that we all forgot we have. — Nikki Rowe

Everyone there pretended to be so bohemian and radical but really they were all worried about offending everyone else and she was fucking sick of it. — Claire Vaye Watkins

I am inspired by the appearance of a bohemian of the new millennium. — John Malkovich

Had he been naive, or overambitious? Both, probably. In life, you might be a bohemian and an adventurer, but you also sought a pattern, an arrangement to help you through, even if
even as
you kicked against it. — Julian Barnes

She dressed in bohemian clothes, penned novels, panted, and yearned to roam forgotten corners of the world. She was habitually defiant and fearless, and when she felt controlled, as she often did, she could be irresistibly willfull. Mostly, she was bored silly by the vanilla sort boys who trailed her around, and by the stodgy set in Miami Beach. — Laura Hillenbrand

a certain bohemian, good-witch sort of charm — Michael Cunningham

I don't lead a particularly Bohemian existence. The main criterion for me is not to be judgemental of other people so long as what they do is not harmful or offensive to others. — Nick Clegg

Rapunzel is a bit more relatable than the other princesses, especially because she doesn't even know that she's a princess until the very end of the movie. I like to think of her as the bohemian Disney princess. She's barefoot and living in a tower. She paints and reads ... She's a Renaissance woman. — Mandy Moore

I grew up in New York City in Greenwich Village and had parents who were somewhat bohemian so I was always on the nonconformist side of the equation. — Anne Waldman

And he was not angry. But, before the pain set in, he had the time to be rueful. He had laid everything out, the best of himself, and it had not been enough. He had considered himself a bohemian, but she had proved too bohemian for him. And he had failed to understand her explanation of herself. — Julian Barnes

My older brother, Jake, and I had a bohemian childhood. My parents are deeply unconventional people from the beatnik generation. They weren't married, and I thought that was normal. We called them by their first names. — Rachel Kushner

Originally, I was against gay marriage because I was opposed to all marriage, being an old-fashioned gay bohemian. The straight people I knew in the sixties were very much opposed to it. I was, too, and it was never a possibility for gays, but when I saw how opposed the Religious Right was to it, I thought it a fight worth fighting. — Edmund White

Big Star invented a vision of bohemian rock & roll cool that had nothing to do with New York, Los Angeles or London, which made them completely out of style in the 1970s, but also made them an inspiration to generations of weird Southern kids. — Rob Sheffield

My aim is to be understood by everyone. I reject the 'depth' that people demand nowadays, into which you can never descend without a diving bell crammed with cabbalistic bullshit and intellectual metaphysics. This expressionistic anarchy has got to stop ... A day will come when the artist will no longer be this bohemian, puffed-up anarchist but a healthy man working in clarity within a collectivist society. — George Grosz

I feel more like I am in the Middle East than in any recognizable part of Europe. There really are wild dogs everywhere, and they cry all night long. There is a least a miserable, bohemian glamour to the life here. There are a ton of outdoor cafes with people smoking and drinking rakia. Gypsies leading dancing bears around on leashes, attractive people, glue-sniffing teenage gangs - contradictions everywhere. My email is hard-wired into a big, gaping hole in the apartment wall and ants and little spiders keep crawling out. I am trying to keep an open mind. — Annie Ward

His wife spotted the danger in our resolutely bohemian ways.
"You have only one year left before you qualify as a doctor and yet you're going away? You have no idea when you'll be back? But why?"
We couldn't give precise answers to her desperate questions and this horrified her ... — Ernesto Che Guevara

She did not know where her home was anymore, and this idea didn't frighten her like it should. - Bohemian Grove — T.M. Williams

I'm just interested in finding out what the hell goes. I mean do you have to be a goddam bohemian type, or dead, for Chrissake, to be a real poet? What do you want - some bastard with wavy hair? — J.D. Salinger

Maclintick's calculatedly humdrum appearance, although shabby, seemed aimed at concealing bohemian affiliations. — Anthony Powell

But five minutes later the five-hundred-year-old Roman chapel was filled to the rafters with the soaring sounds of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody, — Tiffany Reisz

Sometimes, when we cannot attain the freedom we are fighting for, we free ourselves b carving a new path to freedom. — Christina Westover

I am thrice homeless, as a bohemian, as an Austrian, and all over the world, you guessed it right I am Jewish — Gustav Mahler

Whenever I'm feeling kind of down or something like that, or even good, the song 'Bohemian Rhapsody' by Queen is a go-to song of mine. It's like watching a movie, but with your ears. — Casey Abrams

I had bohemian parents in Seattle in the last '60s living in a houseboat. My dad wrote science fiction novels and painted big murals and oil paintings. — Rainn Wilson

But an artist, he realized. Or rather so-called artist. Bohemian. That's closer to it. The artistic life without the talent. — Philip K. Dick

Channeling my inner bohemian in a maxi print skirt and textured denim jacket. — Lubov Azria

My mother was a Bohemian - in the good sense of the word. A searcher. And she investigated various religions. — Madeline Kahn

I think I fish, in part, because it's an anti-social, bohemian business that, when gone about properly, puts you forever outside the mainstream culture without actually landing you in an institution. — John Gierach