Pretentious Quotes

I did this movie, Predestination, and it's one of my favorite movies I've ever made, because sci-fi really lets you talk about ideas in a way that's not pretentious.

What I don't like are pompous, pretentious movies.

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.

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

You live for pretentious metaphors.

It takes a while for a photograph to mature. That sounds really pretentious, but it takes a time for it to go from here to there.

I have a twitter, but I try to not talk about things like, "Oh, I had a grapefruit this morning and it was delicious," because, who cares? But, I think it can serve as a platform for talking about things that matter to me, like the organizations that I work with. As pretentious as that sounds, it is true. You can really make a difference, if you can create a following and actually represent who you are, as opposed to how people want to portray you. But, I don't know what the balance is.

I don't deal in pretentious kids' parties.

I am a big theater fan. It's mostly just being pretentious, I think, and trying to look smart.

Nobody can write such ironic things unless he has a deep sense of injustice-injustice to those members of the race who are victims of the stupid, the pretentious and the hypocritical.

Musicians always come off sounding a little bit pretentious, and a little bit... I don't know, hypocritical, from what they do, talking about strong issues.

As refined fare serves a hungry man as well as and no better than coarser food, the more pretentious artist will not dream of inviting the hungry man to his meal.

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.

My main influences - I loved art. I sounds a little pretentious to say I was into art but I liked drawing. I liked music; music was my outlet from day one. I was giving you an image of Ireland being this dull, grey, massive unemployment, not much going on and the future was the dull queue or - and, for me, the window of hope was music and books. So I fell in love with sort of T-Rex and David Bowie very young. They sort of said, "Hey. You don't have to live in this north side of Dublin that's all grey and depressed. You can be a spider and go to Mars."

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.

It's good to get stage fright. It is necessary to be scared, otherwise you have too much confidence in yourself and you start to get pretentious and do shitty things. It's good to not be so confident in yourself.

What I'm bringing to the pop table is that I'm not pretentious. I'm fighting this war against all that because pop music, in my opinion, should be fun.

Certainly, anybody who says, "in the eyes of God," is pretentious.

Part of the fun of the movie is understanding exactly why we called it Prometheus. And also, it sounds really pretentious, like Inception, so we were just like, "Yeah, that makes the movie sound really smart!" It's so much better then my original title, Explosion. Well, there might be an explosion in the movie.

If you're not allowed to experiment anymore for fear of being considered self-indulgent or pretentious or what have you, then everyone's going to just stick to the rules - there's not going to be any additional ideas.

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 have a dread of sounding pretentious and try not to talk too much about what I do.

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.

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.

The goal with my music is to maintain a certain honesty and quality. That sounds pretty pretentious as if I'm trying to imply no one else is doing this - I don't believe that. I merely mean to say that what everyone else is doing easily, that is to say, creating without impediment - is sort of difficult for me.

I feel like so many people get into that place where creating for someone else is selling out and it is so not about that. It is a stupid, kind of pretentious way of thinking.

Contrary to what you may have heard from Henry Rollins or/and Ian MacKaye and/or anyone else who joined a band after working in an ice cream shop, you can't really learn much about a person based on what kind of music they happen to like. As a personality test, it doesn't work even half the time. However, there is at least one thing you can learn: The most wretched people in the word are those who tell you they like every kind of music 'except country.' People who say that are boorish and pretentious at the same time.

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.

If we wanted to make it the way I imagined I knew that we would have to wake up earlier and start very early. So we prep like crazy. And the competition you have is like Avatar, you have Star Wars, you have all the big Marvel stuff. So if you want to come in the race, you know, don't be pretentious.

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

I've always been fond of the idea expressed in Buddhist art, that there are certain objects that, just by seeing them, can plant a seed for liberation in the individual. That class of objects is called "liberation through seeing." Certain Buddha images are like that, but if it were possible, I would like to find contemporary non-traditional sacred images. Maybe it sounds pretentious, but most spiritual paths point to the possibility that we all can access the deep, absolute dimensions of reality.

I could draw ideas. I remember writing a paper for a seminar class. I remember writing a paper about - and this is going to sound really sort of pretentious, but that's where my mind was at the time - how acting and the performing artist can really be like a Bodhisattva, how they can communicate ultimately an idea in a way that can move and shift things. And that was wonderful. I didn't know many classes where I could try and relate the thing that I really loved and wanted to do into an intellectual idea, and that happened to be one of them.

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

Every writer, by the way he uses the language, reveals something of his spirit, his habits, his capacities, his bias....Avoid the elaborate, the pretentious, the coy, and the cute. Do not be tempted by a twenty-dollar word when there is a ten-center handy, ready and able.

It's very hard to get pretentious about beer. You can become knowledgeable and start to talk with a highfalutin' vocabulary. But you can only go so far with beer, and I've always liked that.

I feel like this thing [that] we're rocking back and forth like we're stuck in a snow bank and we all sort of know it. I feel like people are getting less and less pretentious and less and less hip - hopefully.

If I were pretentious I would say that I'm not an average person. But really, I know how that is.

This deliberately nurtured hatred then spreads to all that is alive, to life itself, to the world with its colors, sounds, and shapes, to the human body. The embittered art of the twentieth century is perishing as a result of this ugly hate, for art is fruitless without love. In the East art has collapsed because it has been knocked down and trampled upon, but in the West the fall has been voluntary, a decline into a contrived and pretentious quest where the artist, instead of attempting to reveal the divine plan, tries to put himself in the place of God.

I felt at some point that I had nothing to lose, and [laughs] maybe I was wrong. I think, you know, there's always these little autobiographical secrets behind things. I think I was really attacking my earlier self, and this kind of pretentious figure.

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.

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.

When you approach it, and I hate sounding like the pretentious actor, but yeah, I think you have to find things within the character that are likeable, or at least human, and not to go at it with any sort of predetermined notions as to what that character is.

Its quite pretentious, really, isnt 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.

I'd love to do a Michel Gondry film. That would be ideal! I'd love to do an Almodovar film; you know, I think he's very, very talented. I don't care that people say he's pretentious. So what? He's a good director; he can be pretentious.

This is going to sound pretentious, but I like comedy that addresses something I find either worrisome or interesting in my life. I like Louis C.K.'s stuff or Bill Burr's stuff. I feel like there's comedy where someone will think of something that they think will work comedically, and then they reverse engineer that point of view so they can say that funny thing. The comedians I like, it could be an allusion, but it feels like their point of view comes first and then the jokes are a reflection of what they actually believe, or are frightened of, or are curious about, or are interested in.

All men have heard of the Mormon Bible, but few except the "elect" have seen it, or, at least, taken the trouble to read it. I brought away a copy from Salt Lake. The book is a curiosity to me, it is such a pretentious affair, and yet so "slow," so sleepy; such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in print. If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle — keeping awake while he did it was, at any rate.

No engineer can go upon a new work and not find something peculiar, that will demand his careful reflection, and the deliberate consideration of any advice that he may receive; and nothing so fully reveals his incapacity as a pretentious assumption of knowledge, claiming to understand everything.

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.

...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.

To better understand God we must first shatter our own idea of God - maybe even day after day. Maybe he's too great to stay compressed in the human mind. Maybe he splits it wide open; this is why pretentious intellectualism so often fails to comprehend the concept of God: it is only accepting of what it can explain while in the process finding higher sources offensive. What we may confidently assert is that faith is the opening that allows God, this unpredictable, unseen power, to travel in and out of the mind without all the pains of confusion.