Type Topics

The perfect female is a higher type of human being than the perfect male: and also something much more rare.—Zoological science provides the means to support this proposition.
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.
—Julie Burchill (b. 1960)

You cannot tell a man that he is a lowbrow any more than you can tell a woman that her clothes are in bad taste, but a highbrow does not mind being called a highbrow. He has worked hard, read widely, traveled far, and listened attentively in order to satisfy his curiosity and establish his squatters’ rights in this little corner of intellectualism, and he does not care who knows it. And this is true of both kinds of highbrow—the militant, or crusader, type and the passive, or dilettante type. These types in general live happily together; the militant highbrow carries the torch of culture, the passive highbrow reads by its light.
—Russell Lynes (1910–1991)