Pretentious Quotes - Page 8

• My secret dream is to write an epic poem. That's probably the most pretentious thing I've said.

  Laurie Anderson

  Dream, Writing, Epic

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• Don't be pretentious is my first advice to young writers. This is the big problem - just because you're getting an MFA doesn't mean you have to write for the Academy. Be true to your personality. Don't temper your personality down with words. Don't build defensive fortresses around yourself with words - words are your friends.

  Gary Shteyngart

  Mean, Writing, Personality

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• 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

  Thinking, Ideas, Laughing

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• I could almost say it is my religion. I guess that sounds pretentious, but I want to live and breathe cinema.

  Giovanni Ribisi

  Sound, Cinema, Want

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com. 2000.

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• When I started off with Trainspotting, it was the way the characters came to me. That's how they sounded to me. It seemed pretentious to sound any other way. I wasn't making any kind of political statement.

  Irvine Welsh

  Character, Political, Trainspotting

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• 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

  Art, Want, Sides

  "Kickin' it with Andy Milonakis". Interview with Bethonie Butler, ew.com. September 18, 2007.

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• I do consider myself to be something of a pretentious wanker.

  Nicky Wire

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• Tony Vigorito has grown a cult following of thousands for one reason - his stuff is fun to read... It's... filled with the freshness and the freewheeling independence that made his reputation... This book is the 'work' of one of the least pretentious and most enjoyable to read novelists at play in America today.

  Kris Saknussemm

  Fun, Book, Play

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• ...Emma Morley wasn't such a paragon either: pretentious, petulant, lazy, speechifying, judgmental. Self-pitying, self righteous, self-important, all the selfs except self-confident, the quality that she had always needed the most.

  David Nicholls

  Self, Lazy, Important

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• I decided to dub the room with the good chairs my lutery. Or perhaps my performatory. I would need a while to come up with something suitably pretentious.

  Patrick Rothfuss

  Needs, Rooms, Chairs

  Patrick Rothfuss (2011). “The Wise Man's Fear: The Kingkiller Chronicle: Day Two”, p.421, Penguin

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• At their best, religious and spiritual communities help us discover this pure and naked spiritual encounter. At their worst, they simply make us more ashamed, pressuring us to cover up more, pushing us to further enhance our image with the best designer labels and latest spiritual fads, weighing us down with layer upon layer of heavy, uncomfortable, pretentious, well-starched religiosity.

  Brian D. McLaren

  Spiritual, Religious, Community

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• I am hard to disgust, but a pretentious poet can do it

  Marianne Moore

  Poet, Disgusting, Can Do

  Marianne Moore (1967). “The complete poems of Marianne Moore”, Viking Pr

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• 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.

  Chuck Klosterman

  Country, Ice, People

  Chuck Klosterman (2004). “Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto”, p.175, Simon and Schuster

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• Well, first of all it's entertainment. That stops us becoming too pretentious or thinking we're great artists.

  Richard Thompson

  Artist, Thinking, Firsts

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• 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.

  Fritz Maytag

  Beer, Vocabulary, Knowledgeable

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• I felt that the Star Wars series became very pretentious as time went on. Just heavy and leaden.

  John Milius

  Stars, War, Heavy

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• No one would argue against the fact that L.A. leads the country in opportunities for being hip and pretentious.

  Merrill Markoe

  Country, Opportunity, Facts

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• I find a lot of young filmmakers make too much of an effort to be trendy and they can be pretentious.

  Sadie Frost

  Effort, Too Much, Sadie

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• 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.

  Hideo Kojima

  Guy, Sound, Gears

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• In order to dream so far, is it enough to read? Isn't it necessary to write? Write as in our schoolboy past, in those days when, as Bonnoure says, the letters wrote themselves one by one, either in their gibbosity or else in their pretentious elegance? In those days, spelling was a drama, our drama of culture at work in the interior of a word.

  Gaston Bachelard

  Dream, Drama, Reading

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• 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

  Mother, Years, Soul

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• Slothful, feeble, pretentious, pedantic, elitist - these are some of the epithets that eventually become associated with the absent minded scholar, the poor sighted reader, the book worm, the nerd.

  Alberto Manguel

  Book, Nerd, Poor

  "A History of Reading". Book by Alberto Manguel, 1996.

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• 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.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Art, Hate, Fall

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• God cannot endure that unfestive, mirthless attitude of ours in which we eat our bread in sorrow, with pretentious, busy haste, or even with shame. Through our daily meals He is calling us to rejoice, to keep holiday in the midst of our working day.

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

  God, Attitude, Holiday

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1954). “Life Togehter”

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• The same tantalizing guile and sublime skill....[The series is] reinforced in its claim to be one of the major literary works of this century....Only two other writers that this reviewer can think of have each created an entire, discrete and compelling world, a totally believable entity which one might wish to inhabit, and they are Joyce and Proust. It is not pretentious to place Patrick O'Brian in the first canon of literature.

  Kevin Myers

  Thinking, Skills, Two

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