Top 100 Quotes About Pretentious
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. For a pretentious Master vampire, Darth Sullivan was pretty dreamy.
Chloe Neill
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. SPOM: Superficial, pretentious, and obnoxiously materialistic.
Grant McLachlan
#9. Oh, my God!" Ignatius bellowed from the front of the house. "What an egregious insult to good taste.
John Kennedy Toole
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. The whole quantum setup ends up being embarrassing in the special way something pretentious is embarrassing when it's also wrong.
David Foster Wallace
#13. The worst thing for a filmmaker is for a film to be labeled as pretentious or heavy-handed.
John Curran
#14. 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
#15. I am a big theater fan. It's mostly just being pretentious, I think, and trying to look smart.
Brian K. Vaughan
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. I will take all my rights! Can you deliver them to my house?
Ljupka Cvetanova
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. A worldly actor is a better actor. It sounds pretentious, but I think having these experiences can translate back into your work.
Nick Robinson
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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.
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. I must have been a very strange child. I was very pretentious. Like Adrian Mole.
Sue Townsend
#43. 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
#44. 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.
#45. 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
#46. Never use jargon words like 'reconceptualize', 'demassification', 'attitudinally', 'judgmentally'. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.
David Ogilvy
#47. I have a dread of sounding pretentious and try not to talk too much about what I do.
James Herbert
#48. If anyone stops us, as long as we mumble something pretentious about the glory of death, we should be fine.
Derek Landy
#49. People like us are dead to society unless we're pretentious, tell people what they want to hear, take off our clothes, or pretend to be like them.
Donna Lynn Hope
#50. 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
#51. All right, all right for you, you pretentious kneecap! How would you like a punch in the eye?
Peter S. Beagle
#52. I find a lot of young filmmakers make too much of an effort to be trendy and they can be pretentious.
Sadie Frost
#53. 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
#54. I never want to be pretentious.
Kesha
#55. Egotorial: An editorial in broadcasting or print media where the subject matter is secondary to the superficial, pretentious, antagonistic, or materialistic ego of the author.
Grant McLachlan
#56. I live in Harlem, New York City. I am unmarried. I like 'Tristan,' goat's milk, short novels, lyric poems, heat, simple folk, boats and bullfights; I dislike 'Aida,' parsnips, long novels, narrative poems, cold, pretentious folk, buses and bridges.
Langston Hughes
#57. 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
#58. My parents were very patient with my pretentious little adolescent snobberies. It took me awhile to accept them.
Matthew Specktor
#59. Poets, on the face of it, have either got to be easier or to write their own notes; readers have either got to take more trouble over reading or cease to regard notes as pretentious and a sign of bad poetry
William Empson
#60. You shouldn't pay attention to things that don't grab your attention. If you do, you're being a pretentious douchebag.
Paul Jarvis
#61. 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
#62. Don't call me a journalist; I hate the word. It's pretentious!
Jimmy Breslin
#63. 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
#64. The height of cleverness is in one's ability to be very clever without seeming clever at all.
Criss Jami
#65. The art world is the biggest joke going. It's a rest home for the overprivileged, the pretentious, and the weak.
Banksy
#66. The greatest sin is appearing naive or old-fashioned so that somebody can give you a sort of a very cool arch smile and devastate you with one extraordinarily crafted line that puts kind of a hole in your pretentious balloon.
David Foster Wallace
#67. 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.
Billy Collins
#68. My first show was 'No Exit.' You couldn't find a more pretentious beginning, but it also instilled some sense of quality.
Chris Eigeman
#69. What I don't like are pompous, pretentious movies.
Peter Jackson
#70. 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
#71. The truth is so simple that it is regarded as a pretentious banality.
Dag Hammarskjold
#72. To me, it's important to preserve proximity to the people. I wouldn't do anything pretentious, and nothing that hurts the people who voted for me. Triumphalism isn't my thing.
Francois Hollande
#74. You know, Granna, going around saying how you don't watch TV... It's not even pretentious anymore... it's just plain out of it.
Donald Margulies
#75. 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.
William Moseley
#76. I remember growing up, saying you're an artist it sounds pretentious but now it's one of the only dignified things that you can call yourself.
Marilyn Manson
#77. Commercial comedy's often set up to feature an ironist making
devastating sport of someone who's naive or sentimental or pretentious or
pompous.
David Foster Wallace
#78. The first red carpet I did was at New York's Paris Theatre ... It was this beautiful night, and everyone is screaming my name. I'm the least pretentious actress you can ever meet. Someone said to me that I look like I've been doing this forever, and I said that's because I watch E!
Amy Landecker
#79. 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.
Michael Light
#80. Anything that is exclusive will be accused of elitism; living one's dreams will be called pretentious. So let's indulge the whim and see where it takes us.
Fennel Hudson
#81. 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.
Thomas Sowell
#82. To say you want to be a director is to risk sounding obnoxious, pretentious, arrogant, and I think women are more fearful of sounding that way than men are.
Nicole Holofcener
#83. A pretentious, showy life is an empty life; a plain and simple life is a full life.
Rick Warren
#84. He walked to the top of a rise and crouched and watched the day accrue. The chary dawn, the cold illucid world.
Cormac McCarthy
#85. It is interesting that Jesus never condemned short prayers, but there is more than one place where Jesus actually condemned the pharisees for making pretentious long prayers.
Paul Silway
#87. [Depp] has real ambitions, but he is deeply afraid of being considered pretentious.
Lasse Hallstrom
#88. She carried herself like a dishonored queen. Even the way she held her head at an angle as she considered the buildings around us seemed watched and pretentious, and I thought about my mother saying there was something toxic about being very beautiful. It must be terrible to be a woman.
Rufi Thorpe
#89. I'd love to have a 19th Century Russian book club where all the members had to act like the pretentious minor noblemen they were reading about.
Gary Shteyngart
#90. Every ironist has in mind a pretentious reader, mirror of himself.
Paul Valery
#91. I am kind of a curmudgeonly person, so I don't gravitate to groups or traditions, which is probably just pretentious of me.
Anne Carson
#92. I want to paint. That is probably going to sound so pretentious coming from someone who's been a musician.
Juliana Hatfield
#93. It sounds very pretentious, but I don't lie. It's too uncomfortable. A lot of people think because you're an actor that makes you a good liar, but one of the things I can't articulate is a bad lie.
Martin Shaw
#94. Can it really be said that before the day of our pretentious science, humanity was composed solely of imbeciles and the superstitious?
R. A. Schwaller De Lubicz
#95. I hate with a bitter hatred the names of lentils haricots - those pretentious cheats of the appetite, those tabulated humbugs, those certified aridites calling themselves human food!
George Gissing
#96. Strip is the power. I'm ready to strip ... I think everyone is. In that I'm saying I think everyone is ready to take off masks and pretentious costumes that don't represent who they truly are.
Truth Hurts
#97. Lord Malquist and Mr Moon was the literary equivalent of the Wonderbra for intellectually pretentious students of the seventies.
Linda Grant
#98. I like to carry around extremely pretentious books, and I don't know if I can read them, but if I hold them near me, it imbues me with a sense of powerful intelligence.
Sam Amidon
#99. Lugubrious and pretentious at the same time.
Lauren Groff
#100. Part of the blame lies with intellectuals who are unable or unwilling to convey their ideas in terms that will play down to the cafe. But anyone who sits in that cafe and dismisses complexity by reveling in their own simplicity is no less pretentious.
Michael Perry
