Top 51 Highbrow Quotes & Sayings

In Providence, we didn't have a first-run movie theater. But we did have an indie movie theatre on the Brown campus. That was the theater we'd go to. I think, as highbrow as it sounds, that I grew up on the films.

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

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

Why are we importing all these highbrow plays like `Amadeus'? I could have told you Mozart was a jerk for nothing.

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.

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.

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.

When my works are being translated, I always get this question from my translators: Up or down? Which means, should it sound biblical and highbrow, or should we take it all down to sound colloquial? In Hebrew, it's both all the time. People in Israel would write in a high register, they wouldn't write colloquial speech. I do a special take on colloquial speech.

Combinatorics is an honest subject. No adèles, no sigma-algebras. You count balls in a box, and you either have the right number or you haven't. You get the feeling that the result you have discovered is forever, because it's concrete. Other branches of mathematics are not so clear-cut. Functional analysis of infinite-dimensional spaces is never fully convincing; you don't get a feeling of having done an honest day's work. Don't get the wrong idea - combinatorics is not just putting balls into boxes. Counting finite sets can be a highbrow undertaking, with sophisticated techniques.

When I start gearing up to do each new season of 'Murdoch', my wife will often catch me out. I start speaking differently. I start enunciating, and start using certain highbrow words, and things like that.

All literature, highbrow or low, from the Aeneid onward, is fan fiction....Through parody and pastiche, allusion and homage, retelling and reimagining the stories that were told before us and that we have come of age loving--amateurs--we proceed, seeking out the blank places in the map that our favorite writers, in their greatness and negligence, have left for us, hoping to pass on to our own readers--should we be lucky enough to find any--some of the pleasure that we ourselves have taken in the stuff that we love: to get in on the game. All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.

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

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.

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.

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.

Podcast listening carries with it a faint aura of cultural snobbery, a notion that to cue up an episode is to do something highbrow and personally enriching, whether it's a history lecture broadcast from a university or an amateur talk show recorded in someone's garage.

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.

The biggest myth I'd like to bust isn't about me - it's about musicals. So many people dismiss the entire art form through highbrow snobbery, but I think a lot of those people would be suprised if they actually saw some.

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

Coming out of school, sometimes people can be theater snobs. I only wanted to do theater, highbrow stuff. But what I learned very quickly is there can be good material in every genre.

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.

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.

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

The first two actors we cast were Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen. Because we started so highbrow, we were able to get anyone. Plus, some of these people have children, and their kids love 'X-Men.' They'll do it because of them - that's our little extra ace in the hole.

A highbrow is a person educated beyond his intelligence.

I personally do not write highbrow music. If I do, it's by accident.

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.

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.

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.

I was a fan of football. I was more of a Raiders fan, but I knew who O.J. was. I knew The Juice, and I remember the Hertz commercials with him running to the airport and whatnot. So he was a highbrow celebrity in my eyes.

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.

We must teach science in the mother tongue. Otherwise, science will become a highbrow activity. It will not be an activity in which all people can participate.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

I don't see myself as particularly highbrow. I am much more populist.

Once, the arts were opera, ballet, classical music, and everything else deemed highbrow.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I think BBC3 gave me my first commissions because I wasn't a middle-class, highbrow journalist. I was able to speak to the contributors on a level that perhaps some journalists don't.

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.

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

I feel like it's a lot easier to parody Democrats just because they take themselves so seriously. I think Republicans have a little bit more of an open mind as to how ridiculous they are. Democrats pride themselves in being the highbrow, smart, right choice.

I have done much more dramatic work than comedic work, but I think comedy is harder than drama in a way. I think it's one of those things that's constantly discussed - people who do comedy think it's harder, people who do drama think it's harder. Usually drama is the one that gets this highbrow respect.

I am interested in the highbrow/lowbrow synthesis. My sensibility, I am proud to say, is middlebrow.