Top 100 Quotes About Pretentious
#1. You are only pretentious if you are not sincere.
John Hodgman
#2. The same people that always think I'm pretentious will think I'm pretentious, and the people who relate to me will continue to relate to me.
Bradford Cox
#3. You live for pretentious metaphors.
John Green
#4. This sounds horribly pretentious, but I like to think that if music hadn't existed, I could have invented it.
Harrison Birtwistle
#5. Yes, of course we were pretentious
what else is youth for?
Julian Barnes
#6. People need realness, reality. People can sense when someone is being pretentious or fake. It's because you feel it; you see it in someone's body language.
Afrojack
#7. I felt that the Star Wars series became very pretentious as time went on. Just heavy and leaden.
John Milius
#8. So apparently all homeschooled kids spoke like pretentious liberal arts college students.
Koren Zailckas
#9. 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
#11. I was once again, Miss Alexandria Charles Montague Collins, the flawless proper lady, pretentious to the help, and people pleaser - the well-bred Southern belle who wore the mask of perfection because no one wanted to see the truth underneath.
Aleatha Romig
#12. I'm not a follower, but I'm not brave enough to be the leader either. I don't see this as a flaw; it's a strength, really. Leaders get burned for having strong opinions. I get to have them without the pretentious bravado.
Tarryn Fisher
#13. I don't want to sound too silly or pretentious about this, but, you know, I love being in Paris. I love working at Louis Vuitton. I love fashion. That's why I do it. No one's forcing me to do this. And nobody forces anyone to buy it. It's a real love affair.
Marc Jacobs
#14. I was a pretty pretentious kid. I was always making art.
Nate Lowman
#15. I myself prefer being called Cassie. It's so much friendlier and less pretentious than Cassandra, don't you think? ... I think both fit you right fine. One is elegant and graceful, the other fun and lively.
Karen Witemeyer
#16. The dominant theories of elite art and criticism in the 20th century grew out of a militant denial of human nature. One legacy is ugly, baffling, and insulting art. The other is pretentious and unintelligible scholarship. And they're surprised that people are staying away in droves?
Steven Pinker
#17. It's bad enough when people I know fuck with my life, but when pretentious bass players interfere with my destiny, then I really get pissed.
Tiffanie DeBartolo
#18. Pretentious and over-active semicolons have reached epidemic proportions in the world of academe, where they are used to gloss over imprecise thought.
Lynne Truss
#19. Here is how to sit through small openings of your father's first art films, surrounded by surly foreign cigarette smoke and conversations so pretentious you literally cannot believe them, you're sure you have misheard them.
David Foster Wallace
#20. 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
#21. Admit it or not, you care about what others think about you. People who declare they don't are more likely pretentious. You cannot stop caring. It is in your nature. But it is absolutely wrong to live your life for others, to make your decisions based on other people's perceptions and expectations.
Grace Scott
#22. There are no moral lectures in 'Lookaway, Lookaway;' there aren't even any lessons. But there is passion. It is a work that hides its craft but never its beauty, that is ambitious but never pretentious, that does not sacrifice nuance for power or power for nuance.
Cathleen Schine
#23. True ability is undisturbed by pretentious criticism.
Joyce Rachelle
#24. I do consider myself to be something of a pretentious wanker.
Nicky Wire
#25. A more complex - but only slightly more original - way to feel out of it is available at the hip and pretentious nightclubs and bars along the Sunset Strip.
Merrill Markoe
#26. 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
#27. At root, vulgar just means popular on a mass scale. It is the semantic opposite of pretentious or snobby. It is humility with a comb-over. It is Nielsen ratings and Barnum's axiom and the real bottom line. It is big, big business.
David Foster Wallace
#28. I never watch TV. I know I'm missing so much, aren't I? I'm probably not. I can't stand popular TV. I've got too much to do to watch it. I know that sounds pretentious and pompous, but there you are.
Stephen Rea
#29. It's quite pretentious, really, isn't 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
#30. I swear to God, if you do not put Mom on the line I'm going to choke you in your sleep." "With your bare hands or your pretentious infinity scarf?" Rell joked.
Raine O'Tierney
#31. I want to write songs with complete sentences. I almos have this obsession with short-changing words. I would never be so pretentious to say that my lyrics are poetry ... Poems are poems. Song lyrics are for songs.
Ben Gibbard
#32. No matter who you are, this contraction is always preferred to the choppy and pretentious alternative: am I not.
Naveed Saleh
#33. Without sounding too pretentious, I was sort of a slave to the narrative. When the narrative cracks in, I have to go where it takes me. I had to go to the Bohemian Grove. It was the obvious end to the book.
Jon Ronson
#34. Religion claims we must obey the mandates of God and clergy can tell us what they are. Science claims we must obey the laws of nature and scientists can tell us what they are. Both claims are absurdly pretentious.
Dee Hock
#35. I always feel so pretentious talking about comedy and deconstructing it. It always feels somehow self-centred to talk about any sort of process.
Steve Carell
#36. 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
#37. Please don't tell me you're one of those pretentious readers who judge people by the books they like. He
Colleen Hoover
#38. I don't deal in pretentious kids' parties.
Rachel Zoe
#39. Kerouac lacks discipline, intelligence, honesty and a sense of the novel. His rhythms are erratic, his sense of character is nil, and he is as pretentious as a rich whore, sentimental as a lollypop.
Norman Mailer
#41. This is going to sound pretentious and esoteric, but I truly mean it from the bottom of my heart. Acting has always been a spiritual journey for me. The very first project I ever acted on paralleled my experience so perfectly even before I was aware of it.
Kandyse McClure
#42. 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
#43. Maybe that sounds a bit pretentious, but I think life experience is always more important than technical knowledge.
Roger Deakins
#44. Without sounding pretentious, it's nice to always be surrounded by creative people who inspire me and keep my levels of creativity charged.
Jaime Winstone
#45. I think good art, if I could be pretentious enough to say, I think good art deals with the micro to explain the macro.
Philip Seymour Hoffman
#46. I can talk about film theory forever and it may sound pretentious or something, but really it's just that I'm fascinated by it.
John Hyams
#47. 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
#48. No one wants to be pretentious about what they do or take it seriously, because that is just weird.
Philip Seymour Hoffman
#49. I think the problem with the term graphic novel is it sounds pompous, it sounds pretentious, whereas on the continent, they call it an album, which to me sounds, it's got more much of a connotation of a kind of a music single and an album collection.
Dave Gibbons
#50. Stop thinking about your pretentious boss and his damn tattoos.
Skye Callahan
#51. 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
#52. I love driving at Monaco but the rest of it, well, I can absolutely take it or leave it. It's extremely pretentious and really not my cup of tea.
Mark Webber
#53. That sort of detailed filmmaking is one, hard to do and not have it be pretentious, and two, have it tell the story, which is what you're taught, that cinema is the language of images and you really should be able to make a film with no dialogue and tell a story.
Nicole Kidman
#54. Films are always pretentious. There's nothing more pretentious than a filmmaker.
John Milius
#55. I used the word 'prose' in the Trans-Siberian in the early Latin sense of prosa dictu. Poem seemed to me too pretentious, too narrow. Prose is more open, popular.
Blaise Cendrars
#56. I went to university in Colorado and studied art history. I did some photography classes there, although it felt really pretentious.
Pamela Hanson
#57. After the many rumours that we had heard about Hitler and the published criticisms we had read about him, we were pleasantly impressed. His appearance was neither pretentious nor affected.
Hjalmar Schacht
#58. 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
#59. American religion is conspicuous for its messianically pretentious energy, its embarassingly banal prose, and its impatiently hustling ambition.
Eugene H. Peterson
#60. I don't wanna sound pretentious talking about myself.
Wale
#61. When I was in college, I was a semiotics major, which is this hopelessly pretentious body of French literary theory.
Ira Glass
#62. My secret dream is to write an epic poem. That's probably the most pretentious thing I've said.
Laurie Anderson
#63. If I were pretentious I would say that I'm not an average person. But really, I know how that is.
Karl Lagerfeld
#64. Well, first of all it's entertainment. That stops us becoming too pretentious or thinking we're great artists.
Richard Thompson
#65. I'm into paradoxes. I wanted to make an album about them, but the group told me I was a pretentious fart. They were right.
Brian May
#66. Getting up to dance to your own stuff looks pretty pretentious. And leaving the dancefloor when it comes on is just awkward.
Sophie Ellis-Bextor
#67. Our business is infested with idiots who try to impress by using pretentious jargon.
David Ogilvy
#68. Slade was never pretentious. It was just music to them. Pop, rock, soul ... it was all the same to Slade. They wrote great songs. And, besides, I'd like to raid their wardrobe.
Noel Gallagher
#69. A novel is no different than graffiti in a bathroom stall, it's just more pretentious.
Christy Leigh Stewart
#70. If you're not allowed to experiment anymore for fear of being considered self-indulgent or pretentious or what have you, then everyone's going to just stick to the rules - there's not going to be any additional ideas.
Francis Ford Coppola
#71. I must have been a really pretentious little girl.
Emily Mortimer
#72. It seems pretentious to assume that we are not creatures of action. I think often it takes a situation of extreme absurdity, extreme action, to push us to the limits of what our character is, and to change us as people.
Eleanor Catton
#73. I do and re-do things that I used to do in a flash, because I want to be more perfectionist about these things. Maybe it sounds pompous and pretentious, but that's the way I feel.
Manolo Blahnik
#74. I just love real characters; they're not pretentious, and every emotion is on the surface, they're regular working people. Their likes, their dislikes, their loves, their hates, their passions; they're all right there on the surface.
David O. Russell
#75. I could almost say it is my religion. I guess that sounds pretentious, but I want to live and breathe cinema.
Giovanni Ribisi
#76. I'm not trying to sound pretentious, but we did sell 12 million records on the first album, so we did get paid a little bit.
Justin Timberlake
#77. In an article titled "Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly," he showed that couching familiar ideas in pretentious language is taken as a sign of poor intelligence and low credibility.
Daniel Kahneman
#78. I'm so tired of this vision of fashion of a diva with a big ego, and you think of big dark glasses to be pretentious and keep far away from the people.
Carine Roitfeld
#79. What passed for society was a loud, giddy whirl of thieves and pretentious hustlers, a dull sideshow full of quacks and clowns and philistines with gimp mentalities.
Hunter S. Thompson
#81. I'd like to think I'm not quite so pretentious as to think my characters go off and live their lives once I've written the final page and switched the computer off.
Jane Green
#82. Lolita... is undeniably news in the world of books. Unfortunately, it is bad news. There are two equally serious reasons why it isn't worth any adult reader's attention. The first is that it is dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion. The second is that it is repulsive.
Orville Prescott
#83. I'm not the kind of actor who runs around and insists on being called Stravinsky by everybody, and my family has to call me Igor. I'm not that kind of actor. I think that's pretentious.
Mads Mikkelsen
#84. Nobody can write such ironic things unless he has a deep sense of injustice-injustice to those members of the race who are victims of the stupid, the pretentious and the hypocritical.
Franklin P. Adams
#85. When there's a negative word or expression-immaculate, for example-but the positive is almost never used, and you choose to use it, you become rather amusing. Or pretentious. Or pretentiously amusing, which can sometimes be good. In any case, you are uncovering a buried word.
E. Lockhart
#86. I'm a concert pianist, that's a pretentious way of saying I'm unemployed at the moment.
Oscar Levant
#87. 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
#88. When you approach it, and I hate sounding like the pretentious actor, but yeah, I think you have to find things within the character that are likeable, or at least human, and not to go at it with any sort of predetermined notions as to what that character is.
Steve Carell
#89. I feel like this thing [that] we're rocking back and forth like we're stuck in a snow bank and we all sort of know it. I feel like people are getting less and less pretentious and less and less hip - hopefully.
Justin Vernon
#90. I loved surrealism and abstract painting, and anything related to those. I always thought painting was the highest form of art. What led me to drawing was seeing so much self-important, pretentious, conceptual-type art in university. I wanted to reject that by making quick, fun art.
Neil Farber
#91. In England you're skewered on the altar of pop culture if you become pretentious.
Mick Jagger
#92. Karma: The delusion of the pretentious; who think the Universe should act as their debt collector.
Steve Maraboli
#93. I am hard to disgust, but a pretentious poet can do it
Marianne Moore
#94. It sounds stupid, but there's nothing like walking down the street and seeing a building that's older than 100 years old. I think London - not to sound pretentious - like New York, it's a big melting pot for all things and it's just got this energy that you can't find anywhere else.
Christian Cooke
#95. One of the more pretentious political self-descriptions is 'Libertarian.' People think it puts them above the fray. It sounds fashionable, and to the uninitiated, faintly dangerous. Actually, it's just one more bullshit political philosophy.
George Carlin
#96. Writing on a computer makes saving what's been written too easy. Pretentious lead sentences are kept, not tossed. Instead of sitting surrounded by crumpled paper, the computerized writer has his mistakes neatly stored in digital memory.
P. J. O'Rourke
#97. 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
#98. Ever since I was a small child, I've had this feeling - it's in my nature, and so it's not even pretentious - that if everyone's going one way, I will go the other, just by some kind of spirit of defiance.
Charlotte Rampling
#99. Fierce language and pretentious advances are signs that the enemy is about to retreat.
Sun Tzu
#100. Artful without being pretentious, well-made without being staid, Trey Moody's investigations of our weird and ordinary world are a little off, by which I mean that they're onto something. Read 'em and be crept into.
Graham Foust
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