Best Pretentious Quotes

#1. A worldly actor is a better actor. It sounds pretentious, but I think having these experiences can translate back into your work.

Nick Robinson

#2. It's so hard to be sincere without sounding pretentious,' she said. 'I mean, what are you supposed to do if you really happen to feel like you've swallowed the universe? Not say so?

Elif Batuman

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. I can't see any reason why a film shouldn't be stylized and visually beautiful. I don't think a beautiful set is pretentious.

Alain Resnais

#7. 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

#8. I had arrived years ago in Paris and just wanted to be famous, fast. When you're pretentious like that, and you think you've planned everything perfectly, it's then that everything goes in the opposite way.

Yael Naim

#9. 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

#10. I will take all my rights! Can you deliver them to my house?

Ljupka Cvetanova

#11. You look a little flushed," he expressed in a pompous tone. I couldn't believe he called me on it. "Do you need me to pull over?" What a pretentious ass! He knew exactly why I was red in the face. I was from embarrassment. I clenched my jaw trying to keep my composure.

Nely Cab

#12. I think that the celebrity memoir as a genre is looked upon as a lesser form. One of my missions as a ghostwriter has been to elevate that form. Maybe that sounds pretentious!

Hilary Liftin

#13. I think energy is the most important thing that we can give to people as performers. Anything else is a little bit pretentious. But energy is not.

Yoko Ono

#14. 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

#15. Hume develops his arguments by a series of models. He doesn't call them models in the pretentious way in which we envelope, very often, pure banalities in this jargon

Lionel Robbins, Baron Robbins

#16. I just could not believe that 30 years later we're still looking at people who are supposed to write little 2-minute pop that when they actually try to do something that's a little bit more they regard it as pretentious.

Pete Townshend

#17. You are -" she stopped fanning long enough to push the glasses up her nose - "Sprout Bradford?"

I thought it was a little pretentious to say "You are Sprout Bradford?" instead of "Are you Sprout Bradford?" so I said, "I are Sprout Bradford!" in my best half-hick, half-retard voice.

Dale Peck

#18. I never personalize anything because I think that can be dangerous. For me, the best way is - this may sound pretentious - but it's to breathe the character and get into the psychology of it.

Imogen Poots

#19. 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.

Michelle Dockery

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. The only thing that makes a book YA is that it is about teenagers, and it is written in a very conventional, non-artsy, non-pretentious way. YA is not the place for the oblique or the cryptic. If it is in any way experimental in form, it is not YA.

Russell Smith

#23. For a pretentious Master vampire, Darth Sullivan was pretty dreamy.

Chloe Neill

#24. First off, what the hell kind of name is that?
Wow, her parents were pretentious naming their daughter Temperance!
What the actual fuck?

Joanne McClean

#25. The meal was pretentious - a kind of beetroot soup with greasy croutons; pork underdone with loud vulgar cabbage, potato croquettes, tinned peas in tiny jam-tart cases, watery gooseberry sauce; trifle made with a resinous wine, so jammy that all my teeth lit up at once.

Anthony Burgess

#26. SPOM: Superficial, pretentious, and obnoxiously materialistic.

Grant McLachlan

#27. Oh, my God!" Ignatius bellowed from the front of the house. "What an egregious insult to good taste.

John Kennedy Toole

#28. Stand-up comedy and comedy in general is the ultimate form of free speech, because you get to poke holes in all the pretentious bubbles politicians and pundits and popes and pretenders try to float over our heads.

Denis Leary

#29. Now I'm going out to dinner with my parents."
"Your parents?"
"Yeah. They really do exist."
"It's eight-thirty."
"Yeah, well if you're rich and pretentious you're supposed to eat late. It's one of the rules."
"Doesn't that become tiresome?"
"Inordinately.

Todd Young

#30. The whole quantum setup ends up being embarrassing in the special way something pretentious is embarrassing when it's also wrong.

David Foster Wallace

#31. The worst thing for a filmmaker is for a film to be labeled as pretentious or heavy-handed.

John Curran

#32. 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

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

Brian K. Vaughan

#34. It's so pretentious, but I believe that with comedy, if you have a good story, 90% of it is casting. Once you get the guys and gals in there, it's pretty easy to make a funny movie.

Matt Walsh

#35. One of my greatest pleasures in writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the saddening realization that such people rarely read.

John Kenneth Galbraith

#36. 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.

Aphex Twin