133 Taste Quotes

I don't like spinach, and I'm glad I don't, because if I liked it I'd eat it, and I just hate it.

The paintings of Francis Bacon to my eye are very beautiful. The paintings of Bosch or Goya are to my eye very beautiful. I've also stood in front of those same paintings with people who've said, 'let's get on to the Botticellis as soon as possible.' I have lingered, of course.

Shakespeare's fault is not the greatest into which a poet may fall. It merely indicates a deficiency of taste.

Vulgarity is, in reality, nothing but a modern, chic, pert descendant of the goddess Dullness.

For the judging of contemporary literature the only test is one's personal taste. If you much like a new book, you must call it literature even though you find no other soul to agree with you, and if you dislike a book you must declare that it is not literature though a million voices should shout you that you are wrong. The ultimate decision will be made by Time.

If a movie is described as a romantic comedy, you can usually find me next door playing pinball.

I did not care for Wagner. My tastes are more classical. Der Fuhrer had no musical taste and liked Wagner because of the bombastic Teutonic glories.

The greatest artists have never been men of taste. By never sophisticating their instincts they have never lost the awareness of the great simplicities, which they relish both from appetite and from the challenge these offer to skill in competition with popular art.

I have hated every Kress I read, especially this one, but the Bear is a standard Bear and if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you'll like.

Neatness begets order; but from order to taste there is the same difference as from taste to genius, or from love to friendship.

Taste is the literary conscience of the soul.

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.

Such and so various are the tastes of men.

Taste is the intermediate faculty which connects the active with the passive powers of our nature, the intellect with the senses; and its appointed function is to elevate the images of the latter, while it realizes the ideas of the former.

A good general rule is to state that the bouquet is better than the taste, and vice versa.

The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion.

Even the greatest fool can accomplish a task if it were after his or her heart. But the intelligent ones are those who can convert every work into one that suits their taste.

The grand tune is the only thing in music that the great public really understands.

On one plane, the very great writers and the popular romancers of the lower order always meet. They use all of themselves, helplessly, unselectively. They are above the primness and good taste of declining to give themselves away.

He who meanly admires mean things is a Snob.

Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.

With respect to excellence of Style and Composition, it may perhaps be said that to practised ears the most pleasing Music is such as has the merit of novelty, added to refinement, and ingenious contrivance; and to the ignorant, such as is most familiar and common.

Nothing, it is true, is more common than for both Science and Art to pay homage to the spirit of the age, and for creative taste to accept the law of critical taste.

Good taste is either that which agrees with my taste or that which subjects itself to the rule of reason. From this we can see how useful it is to employ reason in seeking out the laws of taste.

I'm only a beer teetotaler, not a champagne teetotaler. I don't like beer.

Hell is full of musical amateurs. Music is the brandy of the damned.

'Television is not vulgar because people are vulgar; it is vulgar because people are similar in their prurient interests and sharply differentiated in their civilized concerns.'

This is an excellent martini-sort of tastes like it isn't there at all, just a cold cloud.

It looks like it's been furnished by discount stores.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

For some strange reason we don't go to charming, light movies anymore. People expect a movie to be heavy and turgid, like 'American Beauty.' We've become a heavy-handed society.

I don't drink coffee. I've never had a cup of coffee in my entire life; that's something you probably don't know about me. I've hated the taste since I was a kid.

'Ever had those little gummy pizzas? N-A-S-T-Y.'

'My version of peanut butter would be called 'Mustard', and it would be yellow and tangy and taste good on corn dogs.'

(When asked to define 'Acid Rock') I wouldn't know. I'm a juicer.

Eleven dead bodies. One dead cat. No breasts.

Yes I can, mate, I can take your awful CD out of the machine & throw it as far away from this studio as is humanly possible.' (Responding to the title of a Chris Isaak single, Can't Do A Thing To Stop Me, he was required to play when standing in for a sick colleague in 1993.)

(On the ridiculousness of choosing a best band ever) It's like saying which is better; Tuesday or a piece of string?

Hitler: (biting into a bagel) First of all, Larry, I don't know what I was so afraid of. These are delicious!!!

My tastes are much more obscure than you think. The other day, this reporter asked me who my favorite Spice Girl was and I was like, 'I dunno, but ask me about percussion ensembles from Senegal'.

Lady, it rose below vulgarity.

[to La Resistance]: 'I like French things.I like French fries, French toast, hell, I even like French's mustard'

No one went broke underestimating public taste.

It would be very convincing to say that there's no hope for movies - that audiences have been so corrupted by television and have become so jaded that all they want are noisy thrills and dumb jokes and images that move along in an undemanding way, so they can sit and react at the simplest motor level. And there's plenty of evidence, such as the success of Alien. This was a haunted-house-with-gorilla picture set in outer space. It reached out, grabbed you, and squeezed your stomach; it was more gripping than entertaining, but a lot of people didn't mind. They thought it was terrific, because at least they'd felt something: they'd been brutalized. It was like an entertainment contrived in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World by the Professor of Feelies in the College of Emotional Engineering.

No original Gauguins were to be seen in Australia, for post-impressionism was officially thought to be the vulgar effusion of five-thumbed lunatics.

Many moviegoers and video viewers say they do not 'like' black and white films. In my opinion, they are cutting themselves off from much of the mystery and beauty of the movies. Black and white is an artistic choice, a medium that has strengths and traditions, especially in its use of light and shadow. Moviegoers of course have the right to dislike b&w, but it is not something they should be proud of. It reveals them, frankly, as cinematically illiterate.? I have been described as a snob on this issue. But snobs exclude; they do not include. To exclude b&w from your choices is an admission that you have a closed mind, a limited imagination, or are lacking in taste.

Wild Things is lurid trash, with a plot so twisted they're still explaining it during the closing titles. It's like a three-way collision between a softcore sex film, a soap opera and a B-grade noir. I liked it. Movies such as this either entertain or offend audiences; there's no neutral ground. Either you're a connoisseur of melodramatic comic vulgarity, or you're not. You know who you are. I don't want to get any postcards telling me this movie is in bad taste. I'm warning you: It is in bad taste. Bad taste elevated to the level of demented sleaze.

Our scallops are so delicious your mouth will thank you, which is creepy because your mouth can actually talk.

Jordan's third favourite tit and second favourite twat - it's Peter Andre!

I went to the movies to see Independence Day, the outer-space summer blockbuster of 1996. (Even the most committed intellectual can't survive on an unalloyed diet of Jane Austen remakes.)

'Taste is the ability to keep in balance the contradiction in art between the made and the apparent not-having-become; true works of art, however, never at one with taste, are those which push this contradiction to the extreme, and realize themselves in their resultant downfall.'

They shouldn't even be considered. I don't know, man, they got a couple of hit songs, a catchy groove, great beat, I give them a 0.

This stuff's so fine Julius Caesar called for it with his dying breath. 'A toot, Brutus,' is what he said.

'Good taste is the death of art.'

Guns N' Roses are a shitty band that makes shitty music. (1992)

The smell of the ripe fruit is certainly at first disagreeable, though less so when it has newly fallen from the tree; for the moment it is ripe it falls of itself, and the only way to eat Durians in perfection is to get them as they fall. It would perhaps not be correct to say that the Durian is the best of all fruits, because it cannot supply the place of subacid juicy fruits such as the orange, grape, mango, and mangosteen, whose refreshing and cooling qualities are so grateful; but as producing a food of the most exquisite flavour it is unsurpassed. If I had to fix on two only as representing the perfection of the two classes, I should certainly choose the Durian and the Orange as the king and queen of fruits.

I rather like bad wine; one gets so bored with good wine.

Cleanliness and order are not matters of instinct; they are matters of education, and like most great things, you must cultivate a taste for them.

I can almost listen to a whole Justin Timberlake song without cringing. I do get a bit bummed out when it comes to Ashlee Simpson though.

Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others.

It is natural for us to seek a Standard of Taste; a rule, by which the various sentiments of men may be reconciled; at least, a decision, afforded, confirming one sentiment, and condemning another.

But though there be naturally a wide difference in point of delicacy between one person and another, nothing tends further to encrease and improve this talent, than practice in a particular art, and the frequent survey or contemplation of a particular species of beauty.

This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it.

'Why are we drinking Zima? It's beyond irony. It's not funny or anything. It's just gross. Why not just serve us jugs of Hitler's piss instead?'

I would not like them here or there. I would not like them anywhere. I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them Sam I Am.

There's two kinds of music: good and bad. I like both.

What is now decisive against Christianity is our taste, no longer our reasons.

The thing that pleases me the most about it is that young people like it. It's given kids from 6 to 16 an alternate view of music to what's been available for the past 20 years.

I like you-I have no taste-but I like you.

These questions of taste, of feeling, of inheritance, need no settlement. Every one carries his own inch-rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.

Everyone carries his own inch-rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.

There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.

However incumbent it may be on most of us to do our duty, there is, in spite of a thousand narrow dogmatisms, nothing in the world that anyone is under the least obligation to like - not even (one braces one's self to risk the declaration) a particular kind of writing.

He knows all about art, but he doesn't know what he likes.

There is nothing more dreadful than imagination without taste.

Ghastly Good Taste, or a Depressing Story of the Rise and Fall of English Architecture.

As to matters of dress, I would recommend one never to be first in the fashion nor the last out of it.

I listen to a lot of [Bob] Dylan, who I like a lot. I like Bruce Springsteen. I like T. Rex. I like all different kinds of music. One minute I'll be listening to Benny Goodman and the next I'll be listening to the Sex Pistols! (1988)

My brother] turned me on to Van Morrison and Bob Dylan. I remember listening to the soundtracks to A Clockwork Orange and Last Tango in Paris. I loved Aerosmith, Kiss and Alice Cooper, and when I was older the Clash, the Sex Pistols and the Ramones. (2004)

s a guitarist, I would always look for whatever felt right, something tasteful - and I guess I still do. [I'm] more interested in finding what fits the piece musically as opposed to how many notes I can play quickly. I was never one of those 'look at me' players. (2004)

In conversation with Mona Bismarck and Gore Vidal, 'Mona said, 'Did you see Gore's new play The Best Man when you were in New York?' 'Of course not.'...'Don't like plays, only shows.' He meant musical comedies.' (Vidal, Palimpsest, 206)

To tell you the truth, I am rather perplexed about the concept of 'art'. What one person considers to be 'art' is often not 'art' to another. 'Beautiful' and 'ugly' are old-fashioned concepts that are seldom applied these days; perhaps justifiably, who knows? Something repulsive, which gives you a moral hangover, and hurts your ears or eyes, may well be art. Only 'kitsch' is not art - we're all agreed about that. Indeed, but what is 'kitsch'? If only I knew!

I have but the simplest taste - I am always satisfied with the best.

No, I've never cared for his work. Too scented.

'She loves this newt-nuzzling blister.'

Story belongs to the people. They are sounder judges of it than anyone else, for their senses are unspoiled and their emotions are free.

I miss the lack of melody [in current music] as well. I mean, a lot of people think I'm crazy for liking Creed and I like them purely because they sing! I mean, the singer of Creed sings like the guy from Pearl Jam, very close kind of voice. But I like the fact that Creed sing. I don't care if they're a Bible band, Satan band:

... you can't write a cheque for taste.

A fucking good tune