99 Quotes by Peter York

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.

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

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.

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.

Kate Middleton’s a pretty girl who sounds nice.

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.

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.

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.

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?