Chandler Burr > Quotes

“Metaphor is the currency of knowledge. I have spent my life learning incredible amounts of disparate, disconnected, obscure, useless pieces of knowledge, and they have turned out to be, almost all of them, extremely useful.”
― Chandler Burr, The Emperor of Scent: A True Story of Perfume and Obsession

“I'd said to them that when we read fiction, we pour our own paricular store of emotions - say, the sense of loss we feel for those disappeared from our lives - into the characters set before us. We take the few words with which the writer sketches these characters, the thing he said, the pain she felt, where they were, and our own emotional stockpile magically creates people. As the human eye fleshes out the pixilated image. Fictional characters are highly sophiticated Rorschach blots, and we, along with their author, are their authors. When you read a fictional character, you too are creating her.”
― Chandler Burr, You or Someone Like You

“All molecules pulse with vibrations. They shimmer and wiggle and sing with the vibrations of the electron strings that hold them together, which means molecules are, oddly enough, a sort of musical instrument.”
― Chandler Burr, The Emperor of Scent: A True Story of Perfume and Obsession

“A book is like a person, and one's reaction to a person invariably has more to do with one's own personality and life experience than with the actual person herself.”
― Chandler Burr, You or Someone Like You

“Howard adores Sam's looks. He loves the strong cut of jaw made satin with thickening peach fuzz, loses himself in the green eyes. Howard stares at them like a lover, but always obliquely. (Sometimes we watch our son from a distance. "I wonder what he's thinking," Howard will say.)”
― Chandler Burr, You or Someone Like You

“They exit one by one, or sometimes two by two. You scatter pieces of them on the snow in the woods and then run away as fast as you can, and then you turn and run back towards them, once they're beyond your reach.”
― Chandler Burr, You or Someone Like You

“It makes everyone nervous, smelling,” he says re the vial, “because smell is such a strong sense.”
― Chandler Burr, The Emperor of Scent: A True Story of Perfume and Obsession

“I'm not interested in luxury but I'm interested in the quality of life that is led by people who are interested in luxury. Jean-Claude Ellena

Perfumes are constructed to smell good on paper, not on skin, which is a perversion.

Hay is, as literally as possible, the smell of liquid summer sunlight.

This Marxist idea that the price of a thing is the price of its materials is false.

A wonderfully odd combination of fresh plant and wool gabardine and clear wood, like opening a clean wardrobe to find a tropical fruit tree growing inside it.

There are two great poles of perfumery, Latin and Anglo-Saxon. Seduction and hygiene. The Latin wants to seduce, he says: "See how sexy I am, I'm coming to you.". The American says: "See how clean I am, you can come to me." Jean-Claude Ellena”
― Chandler Burr, The Perfect Scent: A Year Inside the Perfume Industry in Paris and New York

“I find that physics is like oysters—it’s best first thing in the morning—so I always have these physics books in the loo.”
― Chandler Burr, The Emperor of Scent: A True Story of Perfume and Obsession

“They asked Picasso, "What do you do when you're inspired?" Picasso said, "I work." They asked, "What do you do when you find yourself blocked creatively?" Picasso said, "I work.”
― Chandler Burr, The Perfect Scent: A Year Inside the Perfume Industry in Paris and New York

“Literature is a power, like a foreign language you possess.”
― Chandler Burr, You or Someone Like You

“A snob, incidentally, I tell them, is interested in a person because they are of high class. An elitist is interested in a person because they are interesting. That's the difference.”
― Chandler Burr, You or Someone Like You

“Literature, well done, illustrates the reality of human nature.”
― Chandler Burr, You or Someone Like You

“$20 billion is generated every year”
― Chandler Burr, The Emperor of Scent: A True Story of Perfume and Obsession

“I know someone who believes that Hugo Boss scents constitute proof that God does not exist.”
― Chandler Burr, The Perfect Scent: A Year Inside the Perfume Industry in Paris and New York

“A purchase is but a purchase, now that you have money enough and to spare. Formerly it used to be a triumph.”
― Chandler Burr, You or Someone Like You