Top 40 Peter York Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Advertising has always been a huge unrecognised source of outdoor relief for the arts.”

— Peter York

2. “One should never learn from one’s mistakes. Making the same mistakes, over and over again, is a source of unremitting pleasure.”

— Peter York

3. “Nobody knows anything. I deal with people in all walks of life, some of whom should have some idea of what they’re doing. And they’re all clueless. It’s astonishing that any bridges stay up, or that planes don’t constantly plummet from the sky. It’s heartening, in a strange way.”

— Peter York

4. “Rock and roll is the hamburger that ate the world.”

— Peter York

5. “Chandeliers are marvels of drop-dead showiness, the jewellery of architecture.”

— Peter York

6. “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

7. “Socially smart people have always mocked the threateningly mobile, and anti-branding is a central strand of high-end status conflict now.”

— Peter York

8. “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

9. “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

10. “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

11. “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

12. “All I’m saying is that Louis Vuitton and L’Oreal didn’t invent branding at some point in the mid-Eighties. Big, reassuring names have been around a long time.”

— Peter York

13. “There are pop managers, and then there’s Simon Cowell, who isn’t gay, Jewish or particularly riveting. He’s not without interest but he doesn’t exactly have the hinterland of, say, Brian Epstein.”

— Peter York

14. “This may sound insulting to some of my cult studies friends, but there’s a lot of cult studies people who ignore, shall we say, the wider canvas – because they simply don’t know about its existence or they don’t know how it operates.”

— Peter York

15. “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

16. “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

17. “In the future, people will blame the Eighties for all societal ills in the same way that people have previously blamed the Sixties. The various Thatcherite Big Bangs – monetarism, deregulation, libertarianism – have been working their way through the culture ever since.”

— Peter York

18. “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

19. “London clubland divides itself between the St James’s refuge for toffs, and the Conquest of Cool, for the arts and media.”

— Peter York

20. “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

21. “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

22. “Eponymous brands aren’t that popular with analysts and investors now. You can only take an eponymous brand with a living figurehead so far, they argue. What happens when they grow old and die? What happens when they misbehave and go seriously off-brand?”

— Peter York

23. “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

24. “Global new money has houses everywhere, and serious helicopters, it doesn’t aspire to the Miss Marple life of St. Mary Mead.”

— Peter York

25. “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.”

— Peter York

26. “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

27. “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

28. “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

29. “If beauty isn’t genius it usually signals at least a high level of animal cunning.”

— Peter York

30. “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

31. “Kate Middleton’s a pretty girl who sounds nice.”

— Peter York

32. “There is an interior style we intellectuals and design policy wonks know as Haut Euro Pooftastic, which really takes the biscuit.”

— Peter York

33. “Successive generations of middle-class parents used to foist their own favourite books on their children. But some time in the late Eighties it began to wane – not because children had lost interest in adorable animals but because most of it was available on useful, pacifying video.”

— Peter York

34. “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

35. “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.”

— Peter York

36. “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.”

— Peter York

37. “There’s no Peter York Foundation, and you’re no one without one.”

— Peter York

38. “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.”

— Peter York

39. “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

40. “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

41. “By the 1980s, practically no one under 60 in the real civilian world wore hats for anything except weddings, funerals or Ascot. Hats had been in competition with hair, and hair had won. Thirty years before that, Brits of all classes and ages wore hats all the time.”

— Peter York