Peter York Quotes & Sayings (Page 6)

“Brands are useful ways of short-handing practically anything - look at the way Tom Wolfe first used brand name lists to sharpen up a character and a situation. Look at the most brand-referenced novel, Bret Easton Ellis's 'Glamorama.'”

“Girls like Diana Spencer, armed with nothing more than a guinea-pig-rearing certificate, proud to say in that old Sloane way that she was 'as thick as two short planks,' became the exception as girls from Benenden and Downe House started to fast-track towards the City and law, consultancy, media and the arts.”

“I cling to the basic set of tenets laid out in Tom Wolfe's 'New Journalism' - to get out there like the great French novelists of the 19th century and study life. I am a Tom Wolfe fan of the first order.”

“If you've done a bit of journalism, everyone assumes you must be moving into PR. We're absolutely not becoming a PR agency and we're not turning into Brunswick. We will remain SRU, but we will be owned by the Brunswick Group. It's quite different.”

“In Britain, eponymous lifestyle branding as we know it started in the late 1960s, with two fascinating families - the Conrans and the Ashleys - who in increasingly brilliant settings and catalogues sold rather different visions of what the new ideal upper-middle-y life looked like.”

“In London - and forget those extra public pressures on politicians - the lovely old Sloane world of manor houses simply hasn't cut it since Big Bang in 1986, the point at which Mrs. Thatcher really started to achieve her ambition to make this country more like America - its ambition, economy, it's very tangible measures of success.”

“Real writers - serious writers with serious subjects, who earn their living at it - all seem to write in small rooms with that knotty-pine 1974 look on the top-floor rear of their houses. Rooms with views.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”