Most Pretentious Quotes

#1. 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.

Tom Lehrer

#2. America is supposed to be given over to ugliness. There are a good many ugly things there and the ugliest are the most pretentious.

Goldwin Smith

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

Laurie Anderson

#4. When I was growing up, I was the most pretentious person I have ever met. I only read obscure books and watched obscure movies and only listened to obscure music.

Moby

#5. I lived in a town called New Canaan, which is just outside of Connecticut, where they are far too snobby to even mention celebrities. Many American towns are famous for things like, "See the World's Largest Ball of String!" I think my town's would probably have to be "Most Pretentious People".

Katherine Heigl

#6. 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

#7. The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

#8. 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

#9. I hope this doesn't sound pretentious, but I very often like the way Europeans make movies. I think sometimes that don't they care about having to clean certain things.

Michael Keaton

#10. In painting I try to make some logic out of the world that has been given to me in chaos. I have a very pretentious idea that I want to make life, I want to make sense out of it. The fact that I am doomed to failure - that doesn't deter me in the least.

Grace Hartigan

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#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. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

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

Nick Robinson

#19. 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

#20. In twenty years, they'd have country houses and children with pretentious literary names and tennis lessons and ugly cars and liaisons with hot young interns. Hurricanes of entitlement, all swirl and noise and destruction, nothing at their centers.

Lauren Groff

#21. Too large a proportion of recent "mathematical" economics are mere concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols.

John Maynard Keynes

#22. If I said who I was influenced by, it would be really weird and pretentious because it would be people who have nothing to do with what I do. From a listening perspective, there's just something in their playing that I'm inspired by.

Sam Amidon

#23. I must have been a very strange child. I was very pretentious. Like Adrian Mole.

Sue Townsend

#24. Any image I have, it's just what I do, but it comes off as being very pretentious. When you're a bit in the public astigmatism, anything you do seems like you did it so somebody would see you do it, like showing up at the right parties.

Tom Waits

#25. 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.

William Strunk Jr.

#26. What if this is a horrible mistake?" I croaked.
"Oh, it'll be horrible fine, just a bunch of pretentious rich people with shelves of expensive books they've never read.

Ruta Sepetys

#27. Most actors really love it, that's what they want to do. They burn to do it. And so they'll read a script and think, that's an interesting part. And because they love acting, that blinds them to the fact that the rest of it is pretentious nonsense, which it very often is.

Hugh Grant

#28. In a civilization devoted to the strictly abstract and mathematical ideal of making the most money in the least time, the only sure method of success is to cheat the customer, to sell various kinds of nothingness in pretentious packages.

Alan W. Watts

#29. I took a moment before heading inside to share the evening's most important news in a quick text to Mallory: ETHAN EATS TOAST WITH A FORK. It took a moment before she responded. DARTH SULLIVAN = PRETENTIOUS HOTTIE, she responded.

Chloe Neill

#30. Most people are much better at saying things in letters than in conversation, and some people can write artistic, inventive letters, but when they try a poem or story or novel they become pretentious.

Charles Bukowski

#31. I find it [science] analytical, pretentious and superficial-largely because it does not address itself to dreams, chance, laughter, feelings, or paradox-in other words,-all the things I love the most.

Luis Bunuel

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

John Curran

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

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

Chloe Neill

#38. 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

#39. 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

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

Grant McLachlan

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

John Kennedy Toole

#42. 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

#43. 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

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

David Foster Wallace

#45. 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

#46. 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

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

Brian K. Vaughan

#48. 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

#49. 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

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

Ljupka Cvetanova

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. 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