Pretentious Quotes - Page 8

• 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."

  Gavin Friday

  Art, Book, Giving

  Source: bigthink.com

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• I never called myself a writer because it seemed so pretentious - a writer was what somebody else called you, a title bestowed.

  Nguyen Viet Thang

  Titles

  "Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author Viet Thanh Nguyen 'Never Stopped Being a Refugee'". Interview with Kanyakrit Vongkiatkajorn, www.motherjones.com. January/February 2017.

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• It's really a trade-off: you're always having to decide whether you're going to say the more ambitious thing, and lose a little clarity - or are you going to say something really clearly, and sacrifice a little nuance? Get too obscure, and you sound like a pretentious asshole; go overboard with the clarity, and you sound like you're talking down to your audience, or like you yourself are a reductive simpleton.

  Elif Batuman

  Sacrifice, Talking, Ambitious

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• When I'm offstage, I never feel famous. I will never let anybody call a restaurant and say, "We're with Kenny Chesney. Can you get us in?" That's so pretentious. I'm pretty simple except for the fact that I have a really great boat and a little bit of money. When I'm offstage I don't feel like the person everybody sees.

  Kenny Chesney

  Simple, Littles, Facts

  Source: business.highbeam.com

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• When one crosses over from an activity, or the verb, of writing or doing, and becomes a noun, like "a writer" I think that is an act of supreme self-consciousness that I've never, in effect, made. I write, but I don't like to think of myself as a writer. I think it's somewhat self-aggrandizing and pretentious. Now, I am a teacher.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Teacher, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.achievement.org

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• When I lose direction, it becomes very hard to write. I actually get a physical pain, as if my subconscious knows better. That may sound mystical and pretentious, but it's true.

  George Benjamin

  Pain, Writing, Sound

  Source: www.sfgate.com

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• 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.

  Harry Benson

  Mature, Photograph

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Music is one of my big interests - I once had a rather fanciful ambition to be a singer - and of course music is philosophically fascinating. What it is for music to express emotion strikes me as one of the most difficult questions - it's hard to say what it precisely means, although it plainly does mean something. But whenever I have tried to say something about this, it has come out as either banal or pretentious or both.

  Tim Crane

  Ambition, Mean, Emotion

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• One of the reasons I don't like to use the word "tricks" , I do think of them as theatrical pieces, and as pretentious as that might sound, there's a real reason for it. It's not the idea of tricking you; it's the idea of taking you along on this particular journey the way you would in any other theatrical situation. But, hopefully, you're going to be fooled at the end.

  Ricky Jay

  Real, Journey, Thinking

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• 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.

  Zoey Deutch

  Morning, Thinking, People

  Source: collider.com

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• 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

  Mean, People, Unhappy

  Source: deadline.com

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• Heresy is usually quite sophisticated, actually has a meaning, and is to be taken very seriously. It is therefore to be carefully distinguished from turgid, pretentious, badly-written Bullsgeshichte, to use the technical German theological term.

  Carl R Trueman

  Taken, Use, Sophisticated

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• 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.

  Jean Dujardin

  Thinking, Anxiety, Half

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• 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?"

  Paul Banks

  Taken, Thinking, Misunderstood

  "Cap the Old Times: The Story of Interpol's Turn on the Bright Lights". Interview with Ian Cohen, pitchfork.com. November 29, 2012.

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• Skateboarding has always been and continues to be creative and rebellious. Art and design are an extremely important part of skateboard culture, even if it's not recognized by the more elitist or pretentious members of the art world. Skateboarding itself requires creative adaptation to the streets and obstacles. My background as a skateboarder helped me to be a better street artist because I was already conditioned to look at the terrain opportunistically.

  Shepard Fairey

  Art, Creative, Design

  Source: www.thedailybeast.com

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• I often wonder, Is it worth waiting only for things you think are going to be truly great, or is that a pretentious attitude to take?

  Jason Schwartzman

  Attitude, Thinking, Waiting

  Interview with Michael Cera, www.interviewmagazine.com. July 15, 2010.

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• Of all the everyday plants of the earth, grass is the least pretentious and the most important to mankind. It clothes the earth is an unmistakable way. Directly or indirectly it provides the bulk of man's food, his meat, his bread, every scrap of his cereal diet. Without grass we would all starve, we and all our animals. And what a dismal place this world would be!

  Hal Borland

  Men, Animal, Clothes

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• Elton John himself never seems pretentious but Bernie Taupin's lyrics often do - sometimes pretentious in a clever sort of way, but pretentious nonetheless. There is a conflict between Elton's and Bernie's personal styles, no doubt about it.

  Jon Landau

  Clever, Doubt, Style

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• There are good and bad movies, and long ones, and pretentious ones, and fun ones, and it's kind of healthy not just being able to switch off after ten minutes, but have patience.

  Susanne Bier

  Fun, Long, Healthy

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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• I've written a lot of wordy, erudite, pretentious songs, but believe it or not, I'm usually doing my damnedest to resist the temptation to be overly "clever," and trying to keep things as accessible - and singable - as possible.

  Peter Blegvad

  Song, Clever, Believe

  Interview with Franklin Bruno, believermag.com. November 1, 2009.

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• 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

  Writing, People, Trying

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• To those privileged ones -- among whom we count ourselves -- the high-resounding "isms" to which their contemporaries ask them to give their allegiance 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

  Men, Numbers, Giving

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• Men get together in pretentious councils to decide what God is, what God thinks, what God wants the rest of us to do for him, and the one thing he never fails to want is more money.

  Barbara G. Walker

  God, Men, Thinking

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• 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.

  Charlotte Rampling

  Children, Feelings, Way

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

  Jimmy Breslin

  Hate, Call Me, Journalist

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