Pretentious Quotes

In my view, aiming at simplicity and lucidity is a moral duty of all intellectuals: lack of clarity is a sin, and pretentiousness is a crime.

The best artists are people who don't consider themselves artists, and the people who do are usually the most pretentious and annoying. They've got their priorities wrong. They're just doing it to be artists rather than because they want to do it.

The art world is the biggest joke going.

It's a rest home for the overprivileged, the pretentious, and the weak. And modern art is a disgrace - never have so many people used so much stuff and taken so long to say so little.

People need realness, reality. People can sense when someone is being pretentious or fake. It's because you feel it; you see it in someone's body language.

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.

I've learned a lot about genuinely not caring what strangers think about me. It's very liberating.

I'll never forget it. I was starting to hike up the red rocks, and honestly, it was as if I heard the rock say, 'You have the answers. You are your teacher.' I thought I was having an auditory hallucination.

My persona on stage was always coming from a place of I know better than you and I'm going to be a little bit pretentious in your face with these sort of crass ideas.

A pretentious, showy life is an empty life; a plain and simple life is a full life.

Maybe that sounds a bit pretentious, but I think life experience is always more important than technical knowledge.

You know, I use organic products, but I get [laser treatments].

It's what makes life interesting, finding the balance between cigarettes and tofu.

We're human beings and the sun is the sun - how can it be bad for you? I don't think anything that's natural can be bad for you.

The greatest sin is appearing naive or old-fashioned so that somebody can give you a sort of a very cool arch smile and devastate you with one extraordinarily crafted line that puts kind of a hole in your pretentious balloon.

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.

I basically love anything that comes in a hot dog bun... except hot dogs.

I think to have a regular job and be a mom is not as, of course there are challenges, but it's not like being on set.

I don't hold on to fear as much as I used to, because I've learned a lot about genuinely not caring what strangers think about me. It's very liberating. It's very empowering, and I've learned a lot of that from Jay-Shawn Carter-Z, because his approach to life is very internal. It's a very good lesson to learn.

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.

I'm into paradoxes. I wanted to make an album about them, but the group told me I was a pretentious fart. They were right.

Ever since I was a small child, Ive had this feeling - its in my nature, and so its not even pretentious - that if everyones going one way, I will go the other, just by some kind of spirit of defiance.

Beyoncé's like, 'Okay. The singing is great. But you're not having any fun.' She's like, 'Remember when we were at Jay's concert and Panjabi MC comes on and you do your crazy Indian dance? Do that. Be you!'

She's French, so she's teaching them French, and their previous nanny was Spanish, so they're fluent in Spanish.

...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.

I don't want to sound pretentious, but I love art, I like to go to museums, and I like to read books.

I think some period drama can be quite alienating, but 'Downton' isn't.

This is going to sound quite, um, pretentious, but someone said that it's like a soap written by a poet.

The point is seeing that THIS - the immediate, everyday and present experience - is IT, the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe. I believe that if this state of consciousness could become more universal, the pretentious nonsense which passes for the serious business of the world would dissolve in laughter.

Don't call me a journalist; I hate the word. It's pretentious!

It's not like changing one word with my lyrics is going to make them more intelligible or relatable. I was always very misunderstood and taken as very pretentious and serious all the time. I would think, "Do you not see there's a lot of tongue-in-cheek and humor here?"

One of the more pretentious political self-descriptions is 'Libertarian.

' People think it puts them above the fray. It sounds fashionable, and to the uninitiated, faintly dangerous. Actually, it's just one more bullshit political philosophy.

This may sound pretentious, but I don't like being thought of as 'the Metal Gear guy.' There's a lot more I can do.

"Just to have my kids be in the sun every day-picking avocados, going for a swim," she says. "Even for two years or something, and come back when they go to senior school." Just what kids want to do, pick avocados. Also: senior school?

There are two types of actors. There's the actors who can acknowledge that they could never do standup comedy. Then there's the pretentious ones, who believe that acting is harder than standup comedy. I definitely don't think it is. I also think making a comedy is substantially harder than making a drama.

I think good art, if I could be pretentious enough to say, I think good art deals with the micro to explain the macro.

... the community suffers nothing very terrible if its cobblers are bad and become degenerate and pretentious; but if the Guardians of its laws and constitution, who alone have the opportunity to bring it good government and prosperity, become a mere sham, then clearly it is completely ruined.