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Time & Perspective Quote by Terry Southern

"Peter Beard is one of those people I've known a long time. We have an affinity. We share certain values"

About this Quote

Name-dropping as intimacy: Terry Southern doesn’t introduce Peter Beard so much as certify him. The line is almost aggressively plain, which is the point. Coming from a writer whose stock-in-trade was barbed satire and social X-rays, the blandness reads like a practiced understatement, a wink at the way cultural credibility gets laundered through proximity. “One of those people I’ve known a long time” is less biography than badge. Longevity becomes proof of seriousness; the relationship itself stands in for an argument.

“We have an affinity” is doing careful work. It’s vague enough to protect the speaker from specifics, but warm enough to signal a private club. Southern’s world - mid-century bohemia sliding into jet-set art culture - ran on exactly these coded recognitions, where “affinity” means shared appetites, shared enemies, shared immunity. Then he seals it with “We share certain values,” a phrase that sounds moral while refusing to list a single moral. That refusal is not accidental. It lets “values” function as a floating signifier: taste, daring, glamour, transgression, a tolerance for excess, maybe even a shared suspicion of bourgeois pieties.

Context matters: Beard, the photographer-adventurer, was a living emblem of curated wildness; Southern, the novelist-screenwriter, specialized in exposing the slick surfaces of American and elite life. The intent here is alignment. Southern isn’t explaining Beard; he’s placing himself beside him, implying that the real story is the orbit they move in - and that if you’re inside it, you don’t need the footnotes.

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APA Style (7th ed.)
Southern, Terry. (2026, January 16). Peter Beard is one of those people I've known a long time. We have an affinity. We share certain values. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/peter-beard-is-one-of-those-people-ive-known-a-86555/

Chicago Style
Southern, Terry. "Peter Beard is one of those people I've known a long time. We have an affinity. We share certain values." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/peter-beard-is-one-of-those-people-ive-known-a-86555/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Peter Beard is one of those people I've known a long time. We have an affinity. We share certain values." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/peter-beard-is-one-of-those-people-ive-known-a-86555/. Accessed 26 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

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Terry Southern (May 1, 1924 - October 29, 1995) was a Writer from USA.

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