Quotes & Sayings About Pretentious
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Top Pretentious Quotes
Yet as I cast my eye over the whole course of science I behold instances of false science, even more pretentious and popular than that of Einstein gradually fading into ineptitude under the searchlight; and I have no doubt that there will arise a new generation who will look with a wonder and amazement, deeper than now accompany Einstein, at our galaxy of thinkers, men of science, popular critics, authoritative professors and witty dramatists, who have been satisfied to waive their common sense in view of Einstein's absurdities. — Arthur Lynch
I swear to God, if you do not put Mom on the line I'm going to choke you in your sleep." "With your bare hands or your pretentious infinity scarf?" Rell joked. — Raine O'Tierney
It is interesting that Jesus never condemned short prayers, but there is more than one place where Jesus actually condemned the pharisees for making pretentious long prayers. — Paul Silway
Students love trying to imitate Nabokov, which teaches them a lot - mostly about why not to imitate somebody wired so differently from yourself. Nabokov wannabes don't sound just like turds, but like pretentious turds. The writer's best voice will grow from embracing her own "you-ness" - which I call talent, and which is best expressed in voice. Which — Mary Karr
He walked to the top of a rise and crouched and watched the day accrue. The chary dawn, the cold illucid world. — Cormac McCarthy
To say you want to be a director is to risk sounding obnoxious, pretentious, arrogant, and I think women are more fearful of sounding that way than men are. — Nicole Holofcener
A double shot of Laphroaig twenty-five-year-old, neat, please. And ask the bartender for a small shot glass of spring water, non-sparkling," Gabriel instructed without making eye contact with the waitress.
The waitress left, and Rachel began to laugh. "Big brother, only you could make ordering a drink sound pretentious."
-Rachel to Gabriel — Sylvain Reynard
I really gravitate to the comedy of tonal contrasts. I hope that doesn't sound insufferably pretentious. What I mean is people having reactions to things that seem inappropriate, or being happy in an apparently unhappy situation. — Matt Nix
People like us are dead to society unless we're pretentious, tell people what they want to hear, take off our clothes, or pretend to be like them. — Donna Lynn Hope
I concede that a bad romantic novel is embarrassing and indefensible. So is a bad so-called realistic novel. (And it is usually pretentious into the bargain which is insufferable.) But a good romantic novel is a heart-warming thing which strikes a responsive chord in those who are happy and offers a certain lifting of the spirits to those who are not. — Mary Burchell
It was in reading Tristam Shandy that I noticed how it is primarily men who gravitate towards the game-playing self-reflexive style. There is an alienation from emotion in it, a Nervous Nelly fear of letting go and being "exposed." As an attitude towards life, it betrays a perpetual adolescence. Those who hurled themselves after Derrida were not the most sophisticated but the most pretentious, and least creative members of my generation of academics. — Camille Paglia
I take pleasure in working with the non-art photographs that reside in public archives, essentially authorless and owned by the world itself, because I find the world of fine art photography to be pretty silly and pretentious. — Michael Light
She's French, so she's teaching them French, and their previous nanny was Spanish, so they're fluent in Spanish. — Gwyneth Paltrow
'Independent' means one thing to me: It means that regardless of the source of financing, the director's voice is extremely present. It's such a pretentious term, but it's auteurist cinema. Director-driven, personal, auteurist ... Whatever word you want. — Alexander Payne
In the Lamborghini I have to avoid certain roads because of pot holes, and there's nowhere to put my drink, no cup holder. And I'm not going to lie, it looks pretentious. I used to think it was cool to, like, drive it to dinner. Now? Like I really need to be looked at any more. — Danica Patrick
It's quite pretentious, really, isn't it? The notion the audience is going to be interested in you for an hour and a half. Think too much about that and anxiety takes over. — Jean Dujardin
I think, you know, as an actor we get these terribly sort of pretentious ideas in our heads. We try to take everything very seriously at first, you know, until we lighten up, we get onboard, and have a laugh. — Rosamund Pike
I think good art, if I could be pretentious enough to say, I think good art deals with the micro to explain the macro. — Philip Seymour Hoffman
Beg for Love.
Consider this burning, and those who
burn, as gifts from the Friend.
Nothing to learn.
Too much has already been said.
When you read a single page from
the silent book of your heart,
you will laugh at all this chattering,
all this pretentious learning. — Shaikh Abu-Saeed Abil-Kheir
Sunglasses are great, but I always feel a bit pretentious wearing sunglasses. I mean, I do love to wear them. — Daphne Guinness
Don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it. — Charles Bukowski
My secret dream is to write an epic poem. That's probably the most pretentious thing I've said. — Laurie Anderson
Alas, irreverence has been subsumed by mere grossness, at least in the so-called mass media. What we have now, to quote myself at my most pretentious, is a nimiety of scurrility with a concomitant exiguity of taste. — Tom Lehrer
I always feel so pretentious talking about comedy and deconstructing it. It always feels somehow self-centred to talk about any sort of process. — Steve Carell
Admit it or not, you care about what others think about you. People who declare they don't are more likely pretentious. You cannot stop caring. It is in your nature. But it is absolutely wrong to live your life for others, to make your decisions based on other people's perceptions and expectations. — Grace Scott
After the many rumours that we had heard about Hitler and the published criticisms we had read about him, we were pleasantly impressed. His appearance was neither pretentious nor affected. — Hjalmar Schacht
Oh, my God!" Ignatius bellowed from the front of the house. "What an egregious insult to good taste. — John Kennedy Toole
I love playing all kinds of roles. I hope it doesn't sound too pretentious, but I always feel human nature is like a piano, and there are 88 keys, and there are some white keys and some black keys, and each character is a different chord on the piano. Basically, I hope that in the course of my life, I will have played all 88 keys. So, I'll have played heroes and villains and princes and kings and warriors and beggars and thieves and lovers and fathers and wizards and all of those things. That is why I'm an actor ... I love studying people. — Tom Hiddleston
Part of the blame lies with intellectuals who are unable or unwilling to convey their ideas in terms that will play down to the cafe. But anyone who sits in that cafe and dismisses complexity by reveling in their own simplicity is no less pretentious. — Michael Perry
If use is not an appropriate criterion for decision making in the academic life, what is? Love ... The virtues of love as a criterion for choosing a college major ... it is not pretentious. "Use" is pretentious because it claims to know something about the future that it doesn't really know. Love is immediate ... [love] guarantees that you will work to your highest potential ... it is part of who you are, and not just something you think, often wrongly, that you can use. — Leroy S Rouner
I write on a computer, but I've run the complete gambit. When I was very young, I wrote with a ballpoint pen in school notebooks. Then I got pretentious and started writing with a dip pen on parchment (I wrote at least a novel-length poem that way). Moved on to a fountain pen. Then a typewriter, then an electric self-correct. Then someone gave me a word processor and I was amazed at being able to fit ten pages on one of those floppy discs. — Charles De Lint
Can it really be said that before the day of our pretentious science, humanity was composed solely of imbeciles and the superstitious? — R. A. Schwaller De Lubicz
I made the sympathetic face, and the interested face, and even the impressed face. I did not say, 'In the name of all that is holy, cease this incessant drivel, you pretentious ass. — Meg Howrey
It's the work itself that's important to me.' Miranda is aware of how pretentious this sounds, but is it still pretentious if it's true? — Emily St. John Mandel
I have no rules. For me, it's a full, full experience to make a movie. It takes a lot of time, and I want there to be a lot of stuff in it. You're looking for every shot in the movie to have resonance and want it to be something you can see a second time, and then I'd like it to be something you can see 10 years later, and it becomes a different movie, because you're a different person. So that means I want it to be deep, not in a pretentious way, but I guess I can say I am pretentious in that I pretend. I have aspirations that the movie should trigger off a lot of complex responses. — David Cronenberg
It's a dreadfully long monster of a book, and I certainly won't have time to read it, but I'm giving it a thorough skimming. The authors are utterly incompetent - no sense of style or structure at all. It starts out as a detective story, switches to science-fiction, then goes off into the supernatural, and is full of the most detailed information of dozens of ghastly boring subjects. And the time sequence is all out of order in a very pretentious imitation of Faulkner and Joyce. Worst yet, it has the most raunchy sex scenes, thrown in just to make it sell, I'm sure, and the authors - whom I've never heard of - have the supreme bad taste to introduce real political figures into this mishmash and pretend to be exposing a real conspiracy. You can be sure I won't waste time reading such rubbish. — Robert Shea
I was once again, Miss Alexandria Charles Montague Collins, the flawless proper lady, pretentious to the help, and people pleaser - the well-bred Southern belle who wore the mask of perfection because no one wanted to see the truth underneath. — Aleatha Romig
I'm very proud of myself on my, whatever the literacy is, I'm pretentious, totally pretentious. I like to say 'hmm', for example. — Tom Lehrer
I'm a concert pianist, that's a pretentious way of saying I'm unemployed at the moment. — Oscar Levant
Film is definitely a director's medium. They're responsible for the look and everything, and you're a part of that process as an actor, and you try to contribute to the story. But I think it might sound a little pretentious for me to say I think of myself as an artist. I think of myself as a creative person. — Owen Wilson
During my last year of college I wrote the same ten pages over and over again. Those ten pages became the first few pages of my first novel. I can still recite the opening paragraph from memory - only now I cringe when I do it because they are - surprise! - a classic example of overwriting, in addition to being a more than a little pretentious. — Patricia Briggs
To us, the high-resounding "isms" to which our contemporaries ask; us to give our allegiance, now, in 1948, are all equally futile: bound to be betrayed, defeated, and finally rejected by men at large, if containing anything really noble; bound to enjoy, for the time being, some sort of noisy success; if sufficiently vulgar, pretentious and soul-killing to appeal to the growing number of mechanically conditioned slaves that crawl about our planet, posing as free men; all destined to prove, ultimately, of no avail. — Savitri Devi
You are a man with music in his soul. You are capricious, contrary, contradictory. You delight in childish games, and delight even more in winning. For a man of such intense piety, you are surprisingly petty. You are a gentleman, a virtuoso, a scholar, and a martyr, and of those masks, I like the martyr least of all. You are austere, you are pompous, you are pretentious, you are foolish. — S. Jae-Jones
Sometimes we talked about the nature of the human soul and about the Cosmic Unity of souls that I had believed in so firmly when I was 15 years old. My mother did not like the phrase Cosmic Unity. It was too pretentious. She preferred to call it a world soul. — Freeman Dyson
What passed for society was a loud, giddy whirl of thieves and pretentious hustlers, a dull sideshow full of quacks and clowns and philistines with gimp mentalities. — Hunter S. Thompson
But when, at the end of my sophomore year, I became a philosophy major and started doing my first seriously pretentious thinking, I became a vegetarian again. The kind of willful forgetting that I was sure meat eating required felt too paradoxical to the intellectual life I was trying to shape. I thought life could, should, and must conform to the mold of reason. You can imagine how annoying this made me. — Jonathan Safran Foer
God hates this wishful dreaming because it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. Those who dream of this idealized community demand that it be fulfilled by God, by others, and by themselves. They enter the community of Christians with their demands, set up their own law, and judge one another and even God accordingly. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer
My parents were very patient with my pretentious little adolescent snobberies. It took me awhile to accept them. — Matthew Specktor
America is supposed to be given over to ugliness. There are a good many ugly things there and the ugliest are the most pretentious. — Goldwin Smith
If you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, "Nobody's," In his youth, he has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself likes only the role, the thought of himself in a hat. — Annie Dillard
I was only a folk singer for about two years ... . By that time, it wasn't really folk music anymore. It was some new American phenomenon. Later, they called it singer/songwriters. Or art songs, which I liked best. Some people get nervous about that word. Art. They think it's a pretentious word from the giddyap. To me, ... the word art has never lost its vitality. — Joni Mitchell
Do not be afraid of simplicity. If you have a cold chicken for supper, why cover it with a tasteless white sauce which makes it look like a pretentious dish on the buffet table at some fance dress ball? — Marcel Boulestin
If sanity ever returns to our society and we stop taking pretentious elites seriously, one of the signs will be that the public will force the removal of those ugly pieces of twisted metal that are called 'art' in front of government buildings. — Thomas Sowell
Sometimes with pop music, you have to see it to love it. With soul music, it's sparse. There's nothing that's pretentious or planned. It's just so gutsy. — Adele
Colleges and departments of education have developed in response to the need for preparing the tens of thousands of teachers required to staff our immense public school system. That they have a most important function to discharge is plain for all to see. But instead of seeing that their products are equipped with sound learning in the various arts and sciences, they have ignored this and have concentrated almost exclusively upon methods of education. They have erected pseudo-science called "Education," most of whose courses are made up of commonplaces expressed in pretentious jargon. — Richard Weaver
I do consider myself to be something of a pretentious wanker. — Nicky Wire
I am a big theater fan. It's mostly just being pretentious, I think, and trying to look smart. — Brian K. Vaughan
People today are so accustomed to pretentious nonsense that they see nothing amiss in reading without understanding, and many of them at length discover that they can without difficulty write in like manner themselves and win applause for it. And so it perpetuates itself. — George Albert Wells
Please don't tell me you're one of those pretentious readers who judge people by the books they like. He — Colleen Hoover
I don't use big words to show off because it's ostentatious. — Don Roff
I like to carry around extremely pretentious books, and I don't know if I can read them, but if I hold them near me, it imbues me with a sense of powerful intelligence. — Sam Amidon
But you need to strive to try and communicate and try and change things in a similar way. And then people can think that's pretentious or whatever, but it's your life's work, and you've decided that. That's what they made us believe. So we have a pretty high standard, which is at times great and at times not. — Jake Gyllenhaal
Are you kidding me?' Shan asked, slightly drunk, slightly dramatic, and now sitting yoga style on the floor. 'You can't write an honest novel about race in this country. If you write about how people are really affected by race, it'll be too obvious. Black writers who do literary fiction in this country, all three of them, not the ten thousand who write those bullshit ghetto books with the bright covers, have two choices: they can do precious or they can do pretentious. When you do neither, nobody knows what to do with you. So if you're going to write about race, you have to make sure it's so lyrical and subtle that the reader who doesn't read between the lines won't even know it's about race ... ' p.335 — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
I remember the astonishment I felt when I first read Shakespeare. I expected to receive a powerful esthetic pleasure, but having read, one after the other, works regarded as his best: "King Lear," "Romeo and Juliet," "Hamlet" and "Macbeth," not only did I feel no delight, but I felt an irresistible repulsion and tedium ... Shakespeare can not be recognized either as a great genius, or even as an average author ... far from being the height of perfection, [King Lear] is a very bad, carelessly composed production, ... can not evoke among us anything but aversion and weariness ... All his characters speak, not their own, but always one and the same Shakespearian, pretentious, and unnatural language ... — Leo Tolstoy
A pretentious, showy life is an empty life; a plain and simple life is a full life. — Rick Warren
Without sounding pretentious, it's nice to always be surrounded by creative people who inspire me and keep my levels of creativity charged. — Jaime Winstone
I'm proud of the lyrics because I take a lot of care in writing them. I try to make it so people will want to go in and get really into the lyrics. I hope there are different corners to them, with lots of levels-without sounding pretentious. — Andrew VanWyngarden
I felt that the Star Wars series became very pretentious as time went on. Just heavy and leaden. — John Milius
The art world is the biggest joke going. It's a rest home for the overprivileged, the pretentious, and the weak. — Banksy
Stand-up is an art but since it's humor and it's funny - a lot of guys that don't think it's art are probably coming from the angle that they don't want to take it so seriously. I've always looked at it as an art but I don't look at it as a pretentious art. I understand it has to be taken lightly because it is just comedy in the end, but the good stand-up comics are someone with something to say. — Mitch Hedberg
I don't want to be pretentious about, "yes, I need to move in to the more dramatic roles and express myself and prove to everyone that I'm capable of doing it," it really isn't that, I think that's a bad reason to choose roles. It's more like, who would I be working with and would they be fun to do and entertaining to watch, is it an interesting story or character. — Steve Carell
Early on, I said to myself that I would like to write a kind of moral and spiritual history of a place. It sounds a little pretentious, I know. But that's really what I set for myself. — Horton Foote
I want to write songs with complete sentences. I almos have this obsession with short-changing words. I would never be so pretentious to say that my lyrics are poetry ... Poems are poems. Song lyrics are for songs. — Ben Gibbard
I used the word 'prose' in the Trans-Siberian in the early Latin sense of prosa dictu. Poem seemed to me too pretentious, too narrow. Prose is more open, popular. — Blaise Cendrars
This is a huge foyer. She spun in a slow circle, taking in the high ceilings.
She'd said the word using its French pronunciation, foy-ay. Cletus said it that way. The rest of us said foy-er, like it's spelled, because we lived in the United States and weren't pretentious nut jobs. Not that I thought Sarah was a pretentious nut job or made such a judgment about all people based on their pronunciation of that single word.
Just Cletus. He said foy-ay and was most definitely a pretentious nut job. — Penny Reid
You lying liar," Vaan said, "who lies to me with lies. Nobody actually likes Shakespeare! They just pretend to sound more cultural and pretentious. — A.D. Truax
The American critic Dale Peck, author of Hatchet Jobs (2004), argues that reviewing finds its true character in critical GBH such as Fischer's [review of Martin Amis's Yellow Dog]. It represents a return to the prehistoric origins of reviewing in Zoilism - a kind of pelting of pretentious literature with dung, lest the writers get above themselves; it is to the novelist what the gown of humiliation was to the Roman politician - a salutary ordeal. Less grandly, bad reviews are fun, so long as you are not the author. There is, it must be admitted, a kind of furtive blood sport pleasure in seeing a novelist suffer. You read on. Whereas most of us stop reading at the first use of the word 'splendid' or 'marvellous' in a review. — John Sutherland
I don't want to sound too silly or pretentious about this, but, you know, I love being in Paris. I love working at Louis Vuitton. I love fashion. That's why I do it. No one's forcing me to do this. And nobody forces anyone to buy it. It's a real love affair. — Marc Jacobs
Who names themselves 'The Situation?' I do not take myself seriously like that - not in the least bit - that would be so pretentious. — Isaiah Mustafa
I never watch TV. I know I'm missing so much, aren't I? I'm probably not. I can't stand popular TV. I've got too much to do to watch it. I know that sounds pretentious and pompous, but there you are. — Stephen Rea
Pretentious quotations [are] the surest road to tedium. — Henry Watson Fowler
When I was having my hair and make-up done backstage at a fashion show, I would sneak in a copy of Dostoevsky and read it inside a copy of Elle or Vogue. But it would be pretentious of me to say I was more intelligent than the other supermodels. — Carla Bruni
Without sounding too pretentious, I was sort of a slave to the narrative. When the narrative cracks in, I have to go where it takes me. I had to go to the Bohemian Grove. It was the obvious end to the book. — Jon Ronson
Our business is infested with idiots who try to impress by using pretentious jargon. — David Ogilvy
I can talk about film theory forever and it may sound pretentious or something, but really it's just that I'm fascinated by it. — John Hyams
Commercial comedy's often set up to feature an ironist making
devastating sport of someone who's naive or sentimental or pretentious or
pompous. — David Foster Wallace
I'm not the kind of actor who runs around and insists on being called Stravinsky by everybody, and my family has to call me Igor. I'm not that kind of actor. I think that's pretentious. — Mads Mikkelsen
The same people that always think I'm pretentious will think I'm pretentious, and the people who relate to me will continue to relate to me. — Bradford Cox
Being with her was like being backstage during an amateurish, ridiculous play. — Nathanael West
Strip is the power. I'm ready to strip ... I think everyone is. In that I'm saying I think everyone is ready to take off masks and pretentious costumes that don't represent who they truly are. — Truth Hurts
What is this thing of intangible substance that wreaks consequential havoc on our lives? What is this sensitive thread that runs through heart and mind, and when given the slightest tremor grasps hold of all sanity, dragging the afflicted down to insufferable depths or flinging him weightless to euphoric heights? What is this magic we would deem imagination, fantasy, or pretend if not for the evidence of power manifest by human consequences? Effortlessly controlling us, it affects the infected in an instant. It takes but one word, one thought, one act to become immersed.
To stop it is hopeless.
To stifle it, demanding.
To think to master it is both improbable and pretentious.
What is this invisible hand that blinds our eyes and reigns hearts with a string? It is nature's drug and poison we call emotion. — Richelle E. Goodrich
I don't want to sound pretentious, but I love art, I like to go to museums, and I like to read books. — Rainn Wilson
There's a side that I want to do just like really retarded arty films like parody, pretentious art films that kind of are supposed to have some deep meaning. — Andy Milonakis
Writing to impress others is the surest path to pretentious mediocrity. — Katerina Stoykova Klemer