Tom Parker Bowles Quotes

The idea is not to please the most amount of people. Growing up in Versailles, the idea was to please the least amount of people.

Blueprints are for Harvard MBAs. I dropped out of college.

I rebelled by not getting straight A's and not following the path that my elder sister did. She was valedictorian and is very exemplary in her way. I look a lot like her, so I just had to do the opposite. Not that I got bad grades, but I was all about performance and just finding any way that I could to be involved in any kind of production.

I don't come from an Ivy League school or anywhere else.

I'm not a typical public school boy.

I've never been a social person. When I grew up, the other girls would all be combing their hair and exchanging lipstick, and I just couldn't do that group thing.

The CIA is made up of boys whose families sent them to Princeton but wouldn't let them into the family brokerage business.

I've said all along it's a humbling experience being at UCLA. Extremely proud, extremely blessed to be at an institution with all this tradition.

Songs don't have to be about going out on Saturday night and having a good rink-up and driving home and crashing cars. A lot of what I've done is about alienation... about where you fit in society.

My deep dark secret is that I was a nerd in school. I liked the theater. I liked to study. I wasn't very good at sports.

I was really bored, pretty antisocial, and not much of a joiner, and people thought that was a problem. I hated high school. In a way, it was good... I think, for a writer, it's good to be comfortable with being on the outside.

I went to boarding school, and then I went to Oxford, and I know how easy it is for certain groups of people to become wholly insulated from ordinary life.

I was not a collective person or a bohemian; I was an elitist.

I've never been able to relate to many people. I've always been the outcast child. I don't follow the rules. That's kind of how I do everything. Through my music, I've found a place in the world where I'm accepted, so I'm happy.

I was a strange kid. I'm still strange. People didn't get me. And I didn't expect them to.

I didn't want to look distinguished; I wanted to look fun, and also to fade into the street, into the King's Road. If I don't fade into a room at White's, that's fine. My father was chairman of Brooks' and the Beefsteak, and I was brought up in that life, and it bores me rigid.

I think being an outcast is what sort of strengthens the nerd movement, because you're isolated, so you have time.

I'd rather dance in a corner than dance in a circle.

I probably have fundamentally antisocial tendencies. I never took one extracurricular activity. I just failed utterly at that level. Part of me still rebels against that.

I came from Yale, where you get an extracurricular degree in self-importance because you went there. When AIDS happened, I was treated like an outcast. And I don't like that feeling.

I have no concern for the common man except that he should not be so common.

I'm in the loners' society. I don't want to classify myself as anything.

There are people who don't like popularity. It's much better to be exclusive and remote.

I was never totally what we would now call 'politically correct,' even in my most militant phase. I always liked good food, good wines. I suppose it was because I had total confidence in myself.

There are those whose own vulgar normality is so apparent and stultifying that they strive to escape it. They affect flamboyant behaviour and claim originality according to the fashionable eccentricities of their time. They claim brains or talent or indifference to mores in desperate attempts to deny their own mediocrity.