Bad Taste Quotes

The fault of bad taste is usually in over-dressing. Quality not effect, is the standard to seek for. ~ Emily Post

You can't say you're going to ban something in the name of good taste, because then you have directed someone to play the role of good-taste police. We [Americans] permit bad taste in this country. In fact, we even encourage it. ~ John Irving

I always felt sorry for the sidekick as a kid. They never got their due and it left a very bad taste in the mouth - they are defined by a subordinate relationship to someone else. I always felt like a bit of sidekick when I was a kid and it didn't feel fair. ~ China Mieville

One must renounce the bad taste of wishing to agree with many people. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Good taste is better than bad taste, but bad taste is better than no taste. ~ Arnold Bennett

At one campus where I was lecturing, I asked a friend, "How many of my colleagues know I'm gay?" He answered, "All of them." I wasn't surprised. But, just the same, it was kind of spooky, because not one of them had ever given me the faintest sign that he or she knew. If I had spoken about it myself, most of them would have felt it was in bad taste. ~ Christopher Isherwood

Discovery is a child's privilege. I mean the small child, the child who is not afraid to be wrong, to look silly, to not be serious, and to act differently from everyone else. He is also not afraid that the things he is interested in are in bad taste or turn out to be different from his expectations, from what they should be, or rather he is not afraid of what they actually are. He ignores the silent and flawless consensus that is part of the air we breathe – the consensus of all the people who are, or are reputed to be, reasonable. ~ Alexander Grothendieck

Bread without love is like grass without salt
the stomach may be filled, but it leaves a bad taste in the mouth. ~ Leonid Andreyev

I'm not even sure I'm going to see that Colin Farrell wanna-be again."

"What happened?"

"Walked in on him and the bartender in the bathroom last night at Lotus. Usually, that wouldn't bother me, but the bartender had a mullet. Can you imagine, a mullet in 2012? So sad, Travis obviously has tragically bad taste. ~ Tamara Larson

He stared at it in utter disbelief while his secretary, Peters, who'd only been with him for a fortnight, muttered a silent prayer of gratitude for the break and continued scribbling as fast as he could, trying futilely to catch up with his employer's dictation.
"This," said Ian curtly, "was sent to me either by mistake or as a joke. In either case, it's in excruciatingly bad taste." A memory of Elizabeth Cameron flickered across Ian's mind-a mercenary, shallow litter flirt with a face and body that had drugged his mind. She'd been betrothed to a viscount when he'd met her. Obviously she hadn't married her viscount-no doubt she'd jilted him in favor of someone with even better prospects. The English nobility, as he well knew, married only for prestige and money, then looked elsewhere for sexual fulfillment. Evidently Elizabeth Cameron's relatives were putting her back on the marriage block. If so, they must be damned eager to unload her if they were willing to forsake a title for Ian's money…That line of conjecture seemed so unlikely that Ian dismissed it. This note was obviously a stupid prank, perpetrated, no doubt, by someone who remembered the gossip that had exploded over that weekend house party-someone who thought he'd find the note amusing.
Completely dismissing the prankster and Elizabeth Cameron from his mind, Ian glanced at his harassed secretary who was frantically scribbling away. "No reply is necessary," he said. As he spoke he flipped the message acr ~ Judith McNaught

Didn't they understand that for some people the opera, the drama, the ballet, were only boring, and yet a peepshow on Market Street was art? They want to make everything gray and tasteful. Don't they understand how awful good taste seems to people who don't have it? Ha, what do they care about people with bad taste! Nothing. But I do. I love them. They wear cheap perfume and carry transistor radios. They buy plastic dog turds and painted turtles and pennants and signs that say, "I don't swim in your toilet, so please don't pee in my pool!" and they buy smelly popcorn and eat it on the street and go to bad movies and stand here in doorways sneaking nips of whiskey just like I'm doing, and they're all so nice. ~ Don Carpenter

Bad taste is simply saying the truth before it should be said. ~ Mel Brooks

For the plague-stricken their peace of mind is more important than a human life. Decent folks must be allowed to sleep easy o' nights, mustn't they? Really it would be in shockingly bad taste to linger on such details, that's common knowledge. But personally I've never been able to sleep well since then. The bad taste remained in my mouth and I've kept lingering on the details, brooding over them. ~ Albert Camus

Bad taste is real taste, of course, and good taste is the residue of someone else's privilege. ~ Dave Hickey

That's wrong, Mrs. Winning was thinking, you mustn't ever talk about whether people like you, that's bad taste. ~ Shirley Jackson

There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy. ~ E. M. Forster

I am only interested in bad taste if I can enjoy a gruesome tango or watch a movie that makes me cry. ~ Manuel Puig

The thing is I'm very interested in bad taste, as anyone who's ever seen me perform or had dinner with me would know. ~ Tom Baker

but it also had an odd metallic tang to it that I instantly recognized from when I was Buddy and had a bad taste in my mouth that I couldn't get rid of. The bald man probably had the same taste in his mouth, because it was on his breath. ~ W. Bruce Cameron

Q: Who invented mayonnaise? A: Somebody with bad taste. ~ Barry Raspbody

Like everyone else, I have my black list of unfavorite authors and critics, and among intimate friends I sometimes say exactly what I think of them, but I have the feeling that to express my opinions publicly would be in bad taste, that, to people whom one does not know personally, one should speak only of the authors and critics one is fond of. I find reading savage reviews like reading pornography; though I often enjoy them, I feel a bit ashamed of myself for doing so. Still, I must admit that I find Nietzsche's list of his "impracticals" great fun. ~ W. H. Auden

Our men have been real Frenchmen, and their wives
I may say it
have been worthy of them. You may see all their portraits at our house in Auvergne; every one of them an "injured" beauty, but not one of them hanging her head. Not one of them had the bad taste to be jealous ... These are great traditions, and it doesn't seem to me fair that a little American bourgeoise should come in and pretend to alter them, and should hang her photograph, with her obstinate little "air penche ~ Henry James

Good taste was out of place in the company of death, death itself was the essence of bad taste. ~ Toni Morrison

I've been accused of bad taste, and I'll go down to my grave accused of it and always by the same people, the ones who eat in restaurants that reserve the right to refuse service to anyone. ~ Lenny Bruce

The best writing takes you places you don't want to go. It drags you by the hair against your will and leaves you drained, shaky, spent. Sometimes with a bad taste in your mouth. ~ Penfist

Network executives usually have bad taste. It's either just a reflection of what market research tells them that normal people are into, or whatever their adolescent children are obsessed with. I have so often been on the receiving end of whatever powerful network executive's children are watching that week. That ~ Mindy Kaling

Jeb dragged a protesting Anita toward a rapidly approaching sheriff's
four-wheel drive. Blood dribbled through her fingers covering a gunshot
wound on her arm. "Lady, I've never raised a hand to a woman in my life,
but you are sorely testing my limits."
Chloe sympathized. If there was one thing she hated it was a
condescending psycho bitch with bad taste in sweaters. ~ Fiona Archer

Letters to the Dead"

We read the letters of the dead like puzzled gods --
gods nevertheless, because we know what happened later.
We know what money wasn't repaid,
the widows who rushed to remarry.
Poor, unseeing dead,
deceived, fallible, toiling in solemn foolery.
We see the signs made behind their backs,
catch the rustle of ripped-up wills.
They sit there before us, ridiculous
as things perched on buttered bread,
or fling themselves after whisked-away hats.
Their bad taste -- Napoleon, steam and electricity,
deadly remedies for curable diseases,
the foolish apocalypse of St. John,
the false paradise on earth of Jean-Jacques . . .
Silently, we observe their pawns on the board
-- but shifted three squares on.
Everything they foresaw has happened quite differently,
or a little differently -- which is the same thing.
The most fervent stare trustingly into our eyes;
by their reckoning, they'll see perfection there. ~ Wisława Szymborska

Prizing elegance, sweet emotions, and fantasy more than morals and truth; wallowing in fleeting romance rather than trying to give meaning to life, when who knows what's going to happen to you anyway; ignoring virtue and conventions to cherish only the pleasures you are definitely experiencing now: this is the Cocoro of Rococo. No matter how much deep thought, hard work, and agonizing effort went into coaxing out some insight, if that insight is boring, or not beautiful, it doesn't matter. And even if something is made just for laughs, if you find it pleasing, it has value. Other people's opinions and labor do not figure into your assessment; choosing things with your own personal sense of "I like this, I don't like that" is the ultimate individualism that sustains the very foundation of Rococo. Rococo, therefore, embodies the spirit of punk rock and anarchism more than any philosophy. Only in Rococo - elegant yet in bad taste, extravagant yet defiant and lawless - can I discover the meaning of life. ~ Novala Takemoto

Life is too short for bad taste. ~ Glenn Russell

It is bad taste for a poet to be coarse and hairy. ~ Aristophanes

'Bad Taste' was - it was, in many respects, my sort of, my, I guess, my single-minded desire to want to break into the film industry when New Zealand didn't really have a film industry to break into. ~ Peter Jackson

We humans have known since time immemorial something that science is only now discovering: our gut feeling is responsible in no small measure for how we feel. We are "scared shitless" or we can be "shitting ourselves" with fear. If we don't manage to complete a job, we can't get our "ass in gear." We "swallow" our disappointment and need time to "digest" a defeat. A nasty comment leaves a "bad taste in our mouth." When we fall in love, we get "butterflies in our stomach." Our self is created in our head and our gut - no longer just in language, but increasingly also in the lab. ~ Giulia Enders

With the breakdown of the medieval system, the gods of chaos, lunacy, and bad taste gained ascendancy. ~ John Kennedy Toole

I don't really have guilty pleasures. I like what I like, and I don't worry too much about whether it's supposed to be cool or sophisticated or show that I have good or bad taste or whatever. ~ Ann Leckie

A lot of the other companies in the space have really left a bad taste in regulators' mouths. It's actually been a huge advantage when we come in and we take the time to sit down and get to know them, explain the business, explain what we do. ~ Logan Green

I was wondering if the scene in the drawing-room had been a triumph or a disaster or merely a chaotic piece of bad taste verging on bathos, but I reflected that the only important question was whether I had communicated my message to my parents. I continued to smoke my cigarette and occasionally I shuddered. I wondered dimly how anyone ever survived their families. ~ Susan Howatch

Before pop art, there was such a thing as bad taste. Now there's kitsch, schlock, camp, and porn. ~ Don DeLillo

As regards the whole moral twaddle of people about one another, it is time to be disgusted with it! To sit in judgment morally ought to be opposed to our taste! Let us leave this nonsense and this bad taste to those who have nothing else to do, save to drag the past a little distance further through time, and who are never themselves the present ... We, however, would seek to become what we are ... making laws for ourselves and creating ourselves! And for this purpose we must become the best students and discoverers of all the laws and necessities in the world. [335] ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

She was a beautiful woman." Gavner sighed, tracing the outline of one of the elephants. "She just had very bad taste in underwear ... "
"And in boyfriends," I added impishly.
Mr. Crepsley burst into laughter at that ~ Darren Shan

There's not enough bad taste! I LOVE bad taste! I live for bad taste! I am the spokesman for bad taste! ~ Mel Brooks

Love is like cigarettes. It gives you a little pleasure while you're at it, but leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth and a pain in your chest. ~ Loraine Despres

It is bad enough to be bad, but to be bad in bad taste is unpardonable. ~ Agnes Repplier

I'll accept bad taste in a minute, as long as there's some great comedy minds and performances. ~ Mel Brooks

Strikes always leave a bad taste with everyone. ~ Sarah Sutton

Genius creates, and taste preserves. Taste is the good sense of genius; without taste, genius is only sublime folly. ~ Alexander Pope

It's not about doing over the living room of someone who has bad taste in color. This is about restoring historic buildings and instilling pride in a community, which can be done through designing new public spaces and social gathering spots. ~ Genevieve Gorder

For top executives to award themselves these kinds of compensation packages in the midst of this economic crisis is not only bad taste, it's bad strategy-and I will not tolerate it as president. ~ Barack Obama

These people so entranced by dictionaries were outside the bounds of Nishioka's understanding. He couldn't even be sure they thought of their work as work. They spent huge sums of their own money on materials, ignoring the limitations of their salaries. Sometimes they stayed in the office looking up things and never even realized they had missed the last train home. They seemed filled with a mad fever. And yet you couldn't really say they loved dictionaries, either - not given the way they studied and analyzed them with such stunning concentration. There was something almost vindictive in their obsession, as if they were going after an enemy, getting the goods on him. How could they be so wrapped up in making dictionaries? He found their obsession mysterious, with even a whiff of bad taste. And yet - if only Nishioka had something that meant as much to him as dictionaries did to Majime and the rest. Then surely he would see everything differently. He would see a world of such dazzling brightness it would hurt. ~ Shion Miura

Alone Again"

I think of each of
them
living somewhere else
sitting somewhere else
standing somewhere else
sleeping somewhere else
or maybe feeding a
child
or
reading a
newspaper or screaming
at their
new man…

but thankfully
my female past
(for me)
has concluded
peacefully.

yet most others seem to
believe that a
new relationship will certainly
work.

that the last one
was simply the
error of
choosing a bad
mate.

just
bad taste
bad luck
bad fate.

and then there are some who
believe that old
relationships can be
revived and made new
again.

but please
if you feel that way
don't phone
don't write
don't arrive

and meanwhile,
don't feel bruised because this
poem will last much
longer than we
did.

it deserves to:
you see
its strength is
that it seeks
no
mate at
all. ~ Charles Bukowski

The solemnity of the annual Nobel ceremonies in Stockholm with the cheerful bad taste of the grand opening of a shopping center in Los Angeles. ~ Vincent Canby

For the Age has itself become vulgar, and most people have no idea to what extent they are themselves tainted. The bad manners of all parliaments, the general tendency to connive at a rather shady business transaction if it promises to bring in money without work, jazz and Negro dances as the spiritual outlet in all circles of society, women painted like prostitutes, the efforts of writers to win popularity by ridiculing in their novels and plays the correctness of well-bred people, and the bad taste shown even by the nobility and old princely families in throwing off every kind of social restraint and time-honoured custom: all of these go to prove that it is now the vulgar mob that gives the tone. ~ Oswald Spengler

It was business, and business may be presumed to cover quite a lot of bad taste. ~ Ford Madox Ford

If you give a little credit to the concept of the artist, I think you ought to indulge excesses a bit, because that reflects the personality of the writer. Now if a joke is in bad taste or it's not funny, okay, that's awhole different thing, but how you craft a joke is really what the writer's job is, and I don't think that technique should be subject to any editorial constraints. ~ Bill Watterson

She thought of the women at Chicken Little's funeral. The women who shrieked over the bier and at the lip of the open grave. What she had regarded since as unbecoming behavior seemed fitting to her now; they were screaming at the neck of God, his giant nape, the vast back-of-the-head that he had turned on them in death. But it seemed to her now that it was not a fist-shaking grief they were keening but rather a simple obligation to say something, do something, feel something about the dead. They could not let that heart-smashing event pass unrecorded, unidentified. It was poisonous, unnatural to let the dead go with a mere whimpering, a slight murmur, a rose bouquet of good taste. Good taste was out of place in the company of death, death itself was the essence of bad taste. And there must be much rage and saliva in its presence. The body must move and throw itself about, the eyes must roll, the hands should have no peace, and the throat should release all the yearning, despair and outrage that accompany the stupidity of loss. ~ Toni Morrison

Most of the bad taste I've been accused of has been generic bad taste; it's been making fun of an idea as opposed to a person. ~ John Cleese

A Mormon is a man that has the bad taste and the religion to do what a good many other people are restrained from doing by conscientious scruples and the police. ~ Finley Peter Dunne

Obviously, ISU will be primed for revenge and wants to get that bad taste of the last game out of their mouth. ~ Jim Les

To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance. ~ Jean Genet

We all need a splash of bad taste. No taste is what I am against. ~ Diana Vreeland

I guess you could say I have bad taste in men. But I no longer feel the need to be someone's wife. ~ Halle Berry

And yet the feeling of injustice itself turned out to be strangely physical. Even realer, in a way, than a her hurting, smelling, sweating body. Injustice had a shape, an a weight, and a temperature, and a texture, and a very bad taste. ~ Jonathan Franzen

Eating was a welcome distraction, not for us but for them. However the piles on the plates clashed (macaroni cheese sauce oozing orangely under the spinach salad), however sour the mixtures they made (runaway grapes rolling in the gravy!), our guests chewed to prove that their existence hadn't been diverted. For the price of a quick casserole, they bribed us into agreeing that this was God's plan, life was going on. Their cliches were breath mints: they wanted us to suck away to sweeten the bad taste our misfortune left in their mouths. And so we did. ~ Kirk Curnutt

But I have bad taste with a deep fount of intellectuality. ~ Mel Brooks

Me? I stand for uncertainty, insecurity, bad taste, fun, and things that go boom in the night. ~ Tom Robbins

In my estimation, the only thing that is more to be guarded against than bad taste is good taste. ~ Russell Lynes

Bad taste never dies. It just keeps evolving. ~ Laura Lippman

If your choice enters into it, then taste is involved - bad taste, good taste, uninteresting taste. Taste is the enemy of art, A-R-T. ~ Marcel Duchamp

[On Watermelon Man:] ... it is impossible to look at this film without its giving you a share in its insane bad taste, which is rather companionable of it ... ~ Penelope Gilliatt

I remember in that red leisure suit I sort of felt like a Pizza Hut employee, and the white one was the ultimate, with the white turtleneck collar, that was the ultimate in bad taste. ~ Johnny Depp

In San Francisco, vulgarity, "bad taste," ostentation are regarded as a kind of alien blight, an invasion or encroachment from outside. In Los Angeles, there is so much money and power connected with ostentation that is no longer ludicrous: it commands a kind of respect. For if the mighty behave like this, then quiet good taste means that you can't afford the conspicuous expenditures, and you become a little ashamed of your modesty and propriety. ~ Pauline Kael

I'm planning to go redneck chic with the wedding," Maddy announced, looking through the racks of dresses.
"What the hell is that?"
"Redneck chic is a nice way of saying I have bad taste, but I'm embracing it."
Sizing up Maddy's blonde girl next door beauty, I found her dressed normal. "Bad taste how? Is this about Tucker because, yeah, I see it?"
Maddy rolled her blue eyes then walked to the next rack. "Tucker is gorgeous. He's the classiest part of my life."
Nearby, Raven burst into laughter to the point of nearly pissing herself. I didn't blame her since we'd all seen Tucker fall off chairs and struggle with push/ pull doors. Classy, he was not. ~ Bijou Hunter

Heard you started smashing things again," he continues.
"You have bad taste in China." (Mare) ~ Victoria Aveyard

I think when you slow Enrique [Iglesias] down and really listen to what he's saying, it's an explosion of bad taste. ~ Bridget Everett

On rainy afternoons, embroidering with a group of friends on the begonia porch, she would lose the thread of the conversation and a tear of nostalgia would salt her palate when she saw the strips of damp earth and the piles of mud that the earthworms had pushed up in the garden. Those secret tastes, defeated in the past by oranges and rhubarb, broke out into an irrepressible urge when she began to weep. She went back to eating earth. The first time she did it almost out of curiosity, sure that the bad taste would be the best cure for the temptation. And, in fact, she could not bear the earth in her mouth. But she persevered, overcome by the growing anxiety, and little by little she was getting back her ancestral appetite, the taste of primary minerals, the unbridled satisfaction of what was the original food. She would put handfuls of earth in her pockets, and ate them in small bits without being seen, with a confused feeling of pleasure and rage, as she instructed her girl friends in the most difficult needlepoint and spoke about other men, who did not deserve the sacrifice of having one eat the whitewash on the walls because of them. The handfuls of earth made the only man who deserved that show of degradation less remote and more certain, as if the ground that he walked on with his fine patent leather boots in another part of the world were transmitting to her the weight and the temperature of his blood in a mineral savor that left a harsh aftertaste in her mouth and a sed ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

To be your companion."
"Companion?" He said the word as if he were spitting a bad taste from his mouth. "I am a killer. A monster! Can you not see that? ~ Jettie Necole

You have to approach something with indifference, as if you had no aesthetic emotion. The choice of readymades is always based on visual indifference and, at the same time, on the total absence of good or bad taste. ~ Marcel Duchamp

I am just coming out of five years of night, and this orgy of violent lights gives me for the first time the impression of a new continent. An enormous, 50-foot high Camel billboard : a GI with his mouth wide open blows enormous puffs of real smoke. So much bad taste hardly seems imaginable. ~ Albert Camus

I said, God, the press and people, they just really hate me and I'm really trying. Geraldine Page said, Listen to this, Tab. If people don't like you, that's their bad taste. ~ Tab Hunter

Anyone who reads advice books about romance has one problem to begin with: bad taste in literature. ~ Roger Ebert

I suppose that I was a kind of consultant for taste. Is it good taste? Or bad taste? I had an attention to detail, to what would tell best the story. Because many people get excited about the work and drift off from the story. ~ John Hench

It was furnished neither in good taste nor in bad taste, but simply with no attempt at taste at all ... ~ Nancy Mitford

Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste than Herman Melville. ~ D.H. Lawrence

Now that," said Mrs. Morland, up in arms for seeing things straight, "is just rubbish. There isn't any good or bad taste about what books you read: it's what you like or don't like. ~ Angela Thirkell

Never underestimate the bad taste of the American public ~ H.L. Mencken

It's too bad about 'Dark of the Sun.' It was really about Tshombe. When I read the script, I thought it was going to be a political movie, and I thought we might even have a hassle. But the director simplified it to brutality and bad taste. ~ Jim Brown

Your bad taste is fucking immortal! ~ P.C. Cast

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. ~ Susan Sontag

TV is tricky. You can do some stuff and people will tune out and never tune back in. It's sort of like putting a bad taste in somebody's mouth. Some people may not ever tune in again. And then there's some people that will tune in just to tune in and see what's gon' happen. ~ NeNe Leakes

It makes you wonder where they all go, all the letters and notes, the thank-you cards and he birthday invitations, the little missives scrawled along the edges of grocery lists, the doodles on the cardboard backs of spiral-bound notebooks. All the messages, so important, so pressing, so necessary.
Maybe Wolf's right and they never really disappear. Even after they're crumpled and thrown away, they linger and become ghosts. Not the kind that hide up in the attic rattling your shutters, but the kind that follow you wherever you go, coming back to you like an echo, like when something leaves a bad taste in your mouth. I don't know if that's guilt or regret. ~ John David Anderson

It is in bad taste, is the most formidable word an Englishman can pronounce. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

You have to want to have taste. Some people have inherently bad taste. Their problem is really not the bad taste
that can be fixed
but that they don't know they have it! ~ Carrie Donovan

He's like a hero come back from the
war, a poor maimed bastard living out the reality of his dreams.
Wherever he sits himself the chair collapses; whatever door he
enters the room is empty: whatever he puts in his mouth leaves a
bad taste. Everything is just the same as it was before; the
elements are unchanged, the dream is no different than the reality.
Only, between the time he went to sleep and the time he woke up,
his body was stolen. ~ Henry Miller

It is still bad taste to be an avowed atheist. But now it is equally bad taste to be an avowed Christian. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

When you have dinner with the Devil, you learn that either you have good taste or that you have bad taste. ~ Lionel Suggs

For – as everyone knows – in libertinism bad taste is a potent force. ("A Woman's Vengeance") ~ Jules Barbey D'Aurevilly

Bad taste makes the day go by faster. ~ Andy Warhol

People wince when something is in bad taste. They laugh when it's funny. If it's too dirty or wrong, they won't laugh. But if it's a big, dirty, smart, funny laugh, they love it. ~ Michael Patrick King

When I really love someone, I can only show it by making aggressive and bad-taste remarks. ~ Slavoj Zizek

A good interpreter can take a piece of bad music and make it sound pretty decent, while a bad interpreter can take good music and make it sound cheap. I can tell that some people have a bad taste, and unlike on the piano, they smear around a lot, that is bad taste. ~ Ruggiero Ricci