Quote

The newsprint thesp celebrity interview as a middle-brow art form suffers from desperate overproduction. There'll be at least 10 in the broadsheets today and every Sunday hereafter.

Peter York

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Peter York
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: January 1
Author
Journalist
Desperate
Brow
Least
Brows
Middle
Suffers
Suffering
Hereafter
Art
Interview
Form
Celebrity
Today
Interviews
Every
Sunday
Overproduction

More quotes by Peter York

Image
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
Image
Selling scent is a key job for celebrities. At any one time, there'll be hundreds of them at it, going on the world's talk shows, doing photo-shoots, providing employment for thousands. Celebrities are instant brands.
Peter York
Image
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
Image
All brands, whether high-ticket luxury ones such as Cartier or Rolls-Royce or 'masstige' ones with luxe-y overtones but altogether more affordable, all want to grow. Even brands that may have started in a modestly niche design and lifestyle fashion can find themselves under pressure to go global or to sell out at the top.
Peter York
Image
Kate Middleton's a pretty girl who sounds nice.
Peter York
Image
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
Image
I can't actually read interviews with thesps now because they're almost always fantastically predictable, the men especially. Actors are forever stressing their ordinariness, their beer and football-loving commitments.
Peter York
Image
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
Image
George Bush is by American standards rabidly Upper Class - Eastern, Socially Attractive, WASP, 19th-century money, several generations of Andover and Yale (and, while we're at it, his father, George H. W. 'Poppy' Bush, was a former president and his grandfather was the Nazis' U.S. banker in the 1930s).
Peter York
Image
I often find myself worrying about celebrities. It's an entirely caring thing it's not like the people who commission those photographs with cruel arrows to go on the covers of the celebrity magazines. The photographs show botched plastic surgery, raging eczema, weight gain and horrible clothes for maximum schadenfreude.
Peter York
Image
If beauty isn't genius it usually signals at least a high level of animal cunning.
Peter York
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
There is an interior style we intellectuals and design policy wonks know as Haut Euro Pooftastic, which really takes the biscuit.
Peter York
Image
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
Image
For me, wearing a tie is a pleasure, a recherche one but a pleasure nonetheless. You could say that I'm avoiding tie avoidance. My own gorgeous collection runs into hundreds and I buy them the way I buy books - I simply can't pass a shop. I have loved them since I could spend my own money on them.
Peter York
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The White Company offers its loyalists an altogether better, whiter world. The White people have edited out any colours that aren't white, off-white, milk chocolate, grey, taupe or black. They can't be doing with Johnnie Boden's cheery Sloane jokes, his spots and stripes, his occasional 'if it's me, it's U' loud colours.
Peter York