The pure modernist is merely a snob; he cannot bear to be a month behind the fashion.

The connoisseur’s hushed, museum-trained gaze is not well-designed for these purposes. That gaze values subtlety, complexity, ambiguity, and irony. Its most characteristic grace note is self-congratulation at being the kind of person who likes this...

M. Proust was more severe than M. de Caillavet on Anatole France: “He was selfish and supercilious. He had read so much that he had left his heart in other people’s books, and all that...

I am no novel-reader — I seldom look into novels — Do not imagine that I often read novels — It is really very well for a novel.” Such is the common cant. “And what...

I can’t bear literary snobbery.

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

There is a level of snobbery and fickleness in L.A.

Mmm, being irresistibly likeable is such a trial,’ she drawled in an impeccable aristocratic whine. ‘One is constantly in demand, but one must do one’s duty, mustn’t one, dear chap? Noblesse oblige and all that…

What people value in their books—and thus what they count as literature—really tells you more about them than it does about the book.

Confidence is good, but when they hold their heads high like that, it just makes them look cocky and snobbish.

Kilmartin wrote a highly amusing and illuminating account of his experience as a Proust revisionist, which appeared in the first issue of Ben Sonnenberg’s quarterly Grand Street in the autumn of 1981. The essay opened...

I had never thought much of genealogy. A lot of wasted time collecting the names of the dead. Then stringing those names, like skulls upon a wire, into an entirely private and thus irrelevant narrative,...

Marcia was silent a moment. Then a sort of softer gleam came into her angry eye.”Tell me some more about her,” she said.Adele clapped her hands.”Ah, that’s splendid,” she said. “You’re beginning to feel kinder....

No more apologies! So we’re poor! All right, we’re poor! This is America! And America is one place in this sorry world where people Shouldn’t have to apologize for being poor. The question in America...

They [Harvard academia] liked the poor, but didn’t like the smell of the poor.

I am Emma Woodhouse. I feel for her, of her and in her. I have a different sort of snobbism, but I understand her snobbism. Her priggishness. I admire it. I know she does wrong...

There’s no snobbery like that of the poor toward one another.

Language is changing constantly; printing and modern education have slowed it but have not stopped it. Given all this change, when, exactly, was language PERFECT, in the language pundit’s mind? One has the feeling that...

An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger.

Like so many of his successors in the language-crank world today, though, (Jonathan) Swift not only loathes (the) banal and common change (language); he ascribes it to moral failing.

I do not mean to object to a thorough knowledge of the famous works we read. I object only to the interminable comments and bewildering criticisms that teach but one thing: there are as many...

[Snobbishness] is the desire for what divides men and the inability to value what unites them.

The tunnel under the wall of intellectual snobbery is the only way back to common sense reality, but most won’t find it because it is beneath them.

We had enough quite enough snobbery in this world without exporting it to the hereafter.