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The library was one more essential in the parade of rooms in a big 18th-century house - and part of the required kit ever afterwards. The important thing was to have the books, not actually read them.

Peter York

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Peter York
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: January 1
Author
Journalist
Bigs
Library
House
Essential
Part
Essentials
Ever
Rooms
Book
Century
Parade
Important
Books
Parades
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Actually
Afterwards
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More quotes by Peter York

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When you get inside a literary novel you feel that the author, more often than not, just doesn't know enough about things. They haven't been around enough - novelists never go anywhere. Once I discovered true books about real things - books like 'How To Run a Company' - I stopped reading novels.
Peter York
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If beauty isn't genius it usually signals at least a high level of animal cunning.
Peter York
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I'm certainly not a person who spends their every waking moment soaking themselves in signs and signals of the sort that cult studies people study and it's partly, I suppose, because some of those signs and signals aren't worth bothering about. You have to be selective about these things.
Peter York
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When I hear about something allegedly happening in the world I always ask: who is doing it? Trends break out because they're based on real demographics, like there being fewer nuclear families or more people living alone. If 10 people in Shoreditch are doing it, it's a 10-minute fad.
Peter York
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It's just as well that I write in the same facile way wherever I am - no blocks or anguish, no contemplation, no elaborate revision, no need for love-tokens or nice views.
Peter York
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Fashion people think that the careful Nice companies are boring beyond measure. (Nice people think fashionistas look silly and should Get A Life).
Peter York
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Men turn to formal wear when they want a new job or when they think their current one is in danger. They try to present themselves as powerful and successful.
Peter York
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My friends adore 'TOWIE' - the TV documentary series, 'The Only Way is Essex.' They like it, I'm afraid, for the most unworthy of reasons: class mockery. They tune in to wonder in a 'can you believe those people?' way at the natives of Brentwood and Buckhurst Hill.
Peter York
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Marmite - like that other little black-jar job, Bovril - is so much a Mark 1 staple-of-Empire brand, so much part of the Edwardian world of enamel advertising signs, the history of grin-and-bear-it industrial food.
Peter York
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Stephen Jones' hats are what we used to call 'creations' extravagant, odd things for extravagant, odd people like Madonna or Lady Gaga. They're worn in a parallel universe.
Peter York
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The old process of social assimilation used to be mainly about English new money - generated in London, the mucky, brassy North or the colonies - buying those houses and restoring them, and doing the three-generation thing, mouldering into the landscape, and the 'community,' identifying with the place in a familiar way.
Peter York
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Have you got a Beemer, an Audi, a Saab or a Volvo that replaced a Ford, Vauxhall, Rover or Nissan? Many Brits have. Your first Beemer. A particularly nice smell of leather. Something rather plain but satisfactory about the interior. And that lovely enamel wotsit in the middle of the steering wheel. A moment of quiet 'because I'm worth it' pride.
Peter York
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Like lots of baby boomers, I was brought up on archaic anthropomorphism. Upstanding Christian dogs. Rabbits with family values. Because the ancient texts and pictures were sacred - Potter, Milne and the rest. Even concerned parents who knew Freud and Jung never saw the contradictions in feeding us on them.
Peter York
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Rock and roll is the hamburger that ate the world.
Peter York
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I can remember when anything further downtown New York than Canal Street was risky and the whole area still looked like a 70s cop movie location when the original loft-owners were more dash-than-cash, artistic types.
Peter York
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Haagen-Dazs (a clever Scandi-sounding name invented by Americans in 1961) was bought for its Euro-sounding sophistication by the kind of Americans who first bought those Mercs and Beemers, while Ben & Jerry's (now owned by Unilever) brought a post-hippy sensibility to bear. Buyers saw the brand as saying 'all-natural, organic and Fairtrade.
Peter York
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Decorators never quite saw the point of massing books. Books brought colour to a room and filled it up, but shelves bearing just one thing struck them as a decorative display opportunity tragically lost.
Peter York
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People are fretful about lifestyle retailing because the idea that anyone's immortal soul and deepest longings can be quite so readily anticipated and consolidated with several hundred thousand other like-minded types is worrying.
Peter York
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Celebrity poverty, that's the hidden scandal in Blair's Britain. You can't help but worry for them. A girl I knew developed X-ray eyes for celebrity sorrows. She taught me to read the subtext of the down-market celebrity interview, she knew all the Hollywood codes, and followed the deep backgrounds.
Peter York
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In the 1940s, cigarettes would be shown in classy situations, endorsed by celebrities - real A-list Hollywood stars in America - the ads would make claims about tobacco quality or manufacturing science and, bizarrely, some brands had what almost amounted to health claims.
Peter York