Quotes About Luxury

I never saw film stars at home. We had no maid, no cook, no swimming pool.

In the early Seventies, I bought a dilapidated hotel in north Stoke for about £100,000 and spent the same amount again renovating it, putting in a guitar-shaped swimming pool, painting the bathrooms purple, and installing gold dolphin taps.

You've got to be rich to have a swing like that.

In my early 20s I was so miserable doing construction, I wanted something that paid money. I liked nice stuff. I liked cars and architecture, and things that cost money. I wanted to not swing a hammer, and make money... and not do stuff that was dirty. I attempted to get into comedy. I started to do stand-up, but I wasn't very good at it.

If one wanted to find a modern symbol of personal freedom, the motor car is right there near the top of the list. But a car has come to mean much more than that. It has become a powerful statement about who you are and how much you earn.

What I want is not to become a status symbol, but to give beauty at a price.

Limos are fine for prime ministers or presidents who need the security, but there's no need for CEOs or executives to have one as a status symbol.

The Hermes scarf is a coveted, much-collected symbol of success that defines the Paris-based luxury company. But it has no single designer. Rather, the scarves are designed by a far-flung array of freelance artists.

Once upon a time the 'GG' was a status symbol. It was the reason people were buying.

It is a real pleasure to collaborate with Frida Giannini and Gucci to celebrate one of the House's most elegant symbols: the horsebit.

Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things.

Stella had seen his corduroy jacket and ostrich boots in the Neiman Marcus catalog, and together those two items cost more than her car.

To drink champagne with a blonde at one elbow and a brunette at the other gives a man a sense of well-being, and

Indeed." Wolfe wiggled a finger at him. "Have you eaten terrapin stewed with butter and chicken broth and sherry?

And on that table was the most impressive assortment of food: salmon mousse in the shape of a salmon; cold chickens; quail; a huge platter of oysters, shrimp and lobster claws; all kinds of salads; fruits and cheese. It was all so beautifully arranged that I hardly dared to touch it. At one end was a huge bowl of peaches.

We had a creamed turnip soup followed by a terrine that was composed of delightful layers of goodness knows what. Then a poached fillet of sole with pommes dauphine and finally a baba au rhum and coffee. All this was accompanied by a crisp white wine, and I was frankly ready for a nap when we returned to the Rue Cambon.

Diamonds are forever, and so are the Flairs.

soft Corinthian leather

Ritzonia" was the epithet coined by Bernard Bernson, who sold Italian pictures to American millionaires, to describe the unreal, mortifying sameness of their luxury. "Ritzonia," he wrote in 1909, "carries its inmates like a wishing carpet from place to place, the same people, the same meals, the same music. Within its walls you might be at Peking or Prague or Paris or London and you would never know where.

Connoisseurs need not be aristocratic, but must adopt or reject people and tastes according to a patrician sensibility that ignores the worlds of productivity and profit. Money is esteemed as a means to acquire what they value, but despised as a provider of power, showiness, luxury, over-eating or barbarous hobbies.

Similarly, people are far more likely to splurge impulsively on a big luxury purchase when they receive an unexpected windfall than with savings that they have accumulated over time, even if those savings are fully available to be spent.

Ask any Ferrari, Porsche or Ray-Ban salesperson about their average customer and you will very likely hear that he is not, as the adverts would have us believe, a virile young footballer with shiny hair, a rippling six pack and a trouser pouch like a new punch bag. He is, in fact, a middle-aged bloke wearing more chins than he started life with and carrying the clear evidence of forty years of beer and pies slung across his midriff.

To be confronted with a simple and unqualified evil is no doubt a kind of luxury....

Maybe even sadder is the willingness to give your whole life producing items of no social benefit, or even destructive, like slot machines, tawdry luxury goods or nuclear weapons. Is that what a man wants to do with his one single chance at life? Money is not just about paying bills, it must also be connected with making some contribution to life, others and history.