Highbrow Quotes & Sayings

The highbrow/lowbrow schizophrenia of Twitter never stops amazing me. It's the Chris Farley of technologies. — Christian Rudder

Philip Johnson is a highbrow. A highbrow is a man educated beyond his capacity. His house is a box of glass - not shelter. The meaning of the word shelter includes privacy. — Frank Lloyd Wright

I love opera. I love jazz, especially Mingus. This makes me sound highbrow. I'm not. — Phil Klay

I can't think of anything worse than calling Shakespeare 'highbrow,' because on the one hand, it's brilliant writing. But his plays were popular. People went to see them. — Timothy Dalton

And so with Hemingway's writing, he famously wrote to one of his publishers - he said, you don't need a high school education to enjoy my writing. And it's going to titillate the masses. I mean, anybody can relate to it, but the style is so revolutionary that it will titillate highbrow critics, which it did. — Lesley M.M. Blume

Taboos are always going to be interesting.Our [ with Michael Dumontier] style has its range and there is room for explicitness in violence, but not at the expense of our classy, highbrow image. — Neil Farber

A man is lying under machine-gun fire on a street in an embattled city. He looks at the pavement and sees a very amusing sight: the cobblestones are standing upright like the quills of a porcupine. The bullets hitting against their edges displace and tilt them. Such moments in the consciousness of a man judge all poets and philosophers. Let us suppose, too, that a certain poet was the hero of the literary cafes, and wherever he went was regarded with curiosity and awe. Yet his poems, recalled in such a moment, suddenly seem diseased and highbrow. The vision of the cobblestones is unquestionably real, and poetry based on an equally naked experience could survive triumphantly that judgment day of man's illusions. — Czeslaw Milosz

A highbrow is the kind of person who looks at a sausage and thinks of Picasso. — A.P. Herbert

A highbrow is a person educated beyond his intelligence. — Brander Matthews

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

The attitude which the man in the street unconsciously adopts towards science is capricious and varied. At one moment he scorns the scientist for a highbrow, at another anathematizes him for blasphemously undermining his religion; but at the mention of a name like Edison he falls into a coma of veneration. When he stops to think, he does recognize, however, that the whole atmosphere of the world in which he lives is tinged by science, as is shown most immediately and strikingly by our modern conveniences and material resources. A little deeper thinking shows him that the influence of science goes much farther and colors the entire mental outlook of modern civilised man on the world about him. — Percy Williams Bridgman

If anybody gets highbrow around the studio, out he goes. — Walt Disney

What this country needs is Discipline! Peace is a great dream, but maybe sometimes it's only a pipe dream! I'm not so sure - now this will shock you, but I want you to listen to one woman who will tell you the unadulterated hard truth instead of a lot of sentimental taffy, and I'm not sure but that we need to be in a real war again, in order to learn Discipline! We don't want all this highbrow intellectuality, all this book-learning. That's good enough in its way, but isn't it, after all, just a nice toy for grownups? No, what we all of us must have, if this great land is going to go on maintaining its high position among the Congress of Nations, is Discipline - Will Power - Character! — Sinclair Lewis

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

[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. — Ted Gioia

A highbrow is a man who has found something more interesting than women. — Edgar Wallace

We don't want all this highbrow intellectuality, all this book-learning. — Sinclair Lewis

In the sometimes ridiculous action scenarios you're laughing out loud, and so the more committed and in fact the more highbrow the music is, the funnier it is. — Henry Jackman

When highbrow critics accused Time of practicing personality journalism, Luce replied that Time did not invent the genre, the Bible did. — Walter Isaacson

I do not think that there is any doubt that educated people possess a far wider range of humour than the uneducated class. Some people, of course, get overeducated and become hopelessly academic. The word "highbrow" has been invented exactly to fit the case. The sense of humour in the highbrow has become atrophied, or, to vary the metaphor, it is submerged or buried under the accumulated strata of his education, on the top soil of which flourishes a fine growth of conceit. — Stephen Leacock

On the whole, Flora liked it better when they were silent, though it did rather give her the feeling that she was acting in one of the less cheerful German highbrow films. — Stella Gibbons

My father was highbrow: writing long biographies of Dante and stuff like that. Ghostwriting sportsman memoirs? That was sort of the lowest of the low. — David Lagercrantz

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

Reading Encyclopaedia Britannica is like channel surfing on a very highbrow cable system. — A. J. Jacobs

No one expects a Broadway musical comedy to be in the vanguard of what is bohemian, raunchy, folkloric, academic or aggressively experimental. That is not its job. Its job is to synthesize musical and social traditions with high-styled vivacity, especially those that dwell on different sides of the tracks in real life. The highbrow meets the lowbrow; sweet meets hot; uptown, downtown, all around the town. — Margo Jefferson

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. — Roger Sutton

Sometimes the fresh load of guests would turn up before we had got rid of the previous group, and the chaos was indescribable; the house and garden would be dotted with poets, authors, artists, and playwrights arguing, painting, drinking, typing, and composing. Far from being the ordinary, charming people that Larry had promised, they all turned out to be the most extraordinary eccentrics who were so highbrow that they had difficulty in understanding one another. — Gerald Durrell

We had all these famous writers in Sweden and from all over the world home at dinner. I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to be a highbrow writer as my father. He never, ever read anything like crime novels. He wrote biographies of Dante, James Joyce, August Strindberg and Joseph Conrad. — David Lagercrantz

What's great about teen fiction is that it's all mixed up - there's highbrow and lowbrow! — Kaui Hart Hemmings

I had this terrible feeling that every woman who knew anything about anything was tired of Sylvia Plath, tired of her blood and bees and the level of narcissistic self-pity required to compare her father to Hitler- but I'd been left behind. I hadn't gotten the highbrow girl-memo: Don't Read the Girls Who Cried Pain. — Leslie Jamison

It's just human, or inhuman, nature: People will find a way to make a big deal out of their differences-the smaller, the better. It reminded me of the Mantagues and the Capulets (if I wanted to think highbrow), or the Hatfields and the McCoys (if I wanted to go lowbrow) ... or the Jets and the Sharks (if I happened to feel musical). — Kevin J. Anderson

The beautiful thing is I have sort of grown up. I don't care if I'm highbrow or not anymore. — David Lagercrantz

Even those novelists most commonly deemed "philosophical" have sometimes answered with an emphatic no. Iris Murdoch, the longtime Oxford philosopher and author of some two dozen novels treating highbrow themes like consciousness and morality, argued that philosophy and literature were contrary pursuits. Philosophy calls on the analytical mind to solve conceptual problems in an "austere, unselfish, candid" prose, she said in a BBC interview broadcast in 1978, while literature looks to the imagination to show us something "mysterious, ambiguous, particular" about the world. Any appearance of philosophical ideas in her own novels was an inconsequential reflection of what she happened to know. "If I knew about sailing ships I would put in sailing ships," she said. "And in a way, as a novelist, I would rather know about sailing ships than about philosophy. — Iris Murdoch

You don't need fancy highbrow traditions or money to really learn. You just need people with the desire to better themselves. — Adam Cooper

Hey Highbrow. Next time remember to tuck and roll. — Naima Simone

Its regurgitation in newspapers of record and blogs of repute would be another reminder why the American society as a whole could never be call itself highbrow, why its easy availability of of stories on the private lives of others was turning adults, who would otherwise be enriching their minds with worthwhile knowledge, into juveniles who needed the satisfaction of knowing that others were more pathetic than them. — Imbolo Mbue

Eventually, my highbrow parents, who so hated the Eisenhower suburban culture of the 1950s that the only magazines they subscribed to were 'The Atlantic' and 'The New Yorker,' broke down and got 'Life' magazine. — Sally Mann

A humble, bootstrappy patriot, Knox wooed, then married Lucy Flucker, the highbrow daughter of the Loyalist governor of the province of Massachusetts. — Sarah Vowell

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

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

The inspiration comes from everywhere, from what I grew up with. There's so much silliness and nonsense in the world that we regard as normal working procedure. The satirical point of the view may be to counterpoint that. The way we look at classics has been hijacked by the intelligentsia - Shakespeare is highbrow and seen as something clever people do, which isn't right at all. I basically pull inspiration from everywhere. — Jasper Fforde

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

Anyone who says the Backstreet Boys can't sing is crazy. They're probably just reading some highbrow critic who hates anyone the general public embraces. I'm sorry, but those boys sing their butts off. They work hard on their choreography, and on their harmonies. Their tracks are tight and solid. Their songs are musical and memorable. — Tony Orlando

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

But the not-very-highbrow truth of the matter was that the reading was how I got my ya-yas out.
For the sake of my bookish reputation I upgraded to Tolstoy and Steinbeck before I understood them, but my dark secret was that really, I preferred the junk. The Dragonriders of Pern, Flowers in the Attic, The Clan of the Cave Bear. This stuff was like my stash of Playboys under the mattress. — Julie Powell

Am I drunk?" he asked Crewcut.
"You're not drunk, Boss," Crewcut replied. "How could a superior individual like you be drunk? People around here who get drunk are the dregs of society, illiterates, uncouth people. Highbrow folks, those of the 'spring snow,' cannot get drunk. You're a highbrow, therefore you cannot be drunk. — Mo Yan

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. — Sophie Hannah

Nobody has ever written as many enjoyable, fun-to-read crime novels as Agatha Christie. It's all about the storytelling and the pleasure of the reader. She doesn't want to be deep or highbrow. — Sophie Hannah

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

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. — Adrian Edmondson

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