Pretentious Quotes

“July 7, 1986: Montreux It is only now that I realize the importance of a biography. I mean I always have realized that I enjoy to read (and have learned many things from) the biographies of artists whom I admire. It is probably my main source of education. In the beginning of my “career” (what an awful word) I was misled by a teacher who thought the things I was writing to be pretentious and self important. Years later, when I read those things I wrote in 1978, it didn’t seem so pretentious for almost everything I wrote about “wanting to do,” I actually did in the four or five years that followed.”

“What I don't like are pompous, pretentious movies.”

“Commercial comedy's often set up to feature an ironist makingdevastating sport of someone who's naive or sentimental or pretentious orpompous.”

“Whenever an occasion arose in which she needed an opinion on something in the wider world, she borrowed her husband's. If this had been all there was to her, she wouldn't have bothered anyone, but as is so often the case with such women, she suffered from an incurable case of of pretentiousness. Lacking any internalized values of her own, such people can arrive at a standpoint only by adopting other people's standards or views. The only principle that governs their minds is the question "How do I look?”

“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.”

“Pretentiousness isn't always just big words and meaningless jargon, but also pretty words that either when put into action don't mean beans or hurt you in the long run. Oftentimes, the former appeals to the intellect whereas the latter appeals to the heart.”

“I have no rules. For me, it's a full, full experience to make a movie. It takes a lot of time, and I want there to be a lot of stuff in it. You're looking for every shot in the movie to have resonance and want it to be something you can see a second time, and then I'd like it to be something you can see 10 years later, and it becomes a different movie, because you're a different person. So that means I want it to be deep, not in a pretentious way, but I guess I can say I am pretentious in that I pretend. I have aspirations that the movie should trigger off a lot of complex responses.”

“To better understand God we must first shatter our own idea of God - maybe even day after day. Maybe he's too great to stay compressed in the human mind. Maybe he splits it wide open; this is why pretentious intellectualism so often fails to comprehend the concept of God: it is only accepting of what it can explain while in the process finding higher sources offensive. What we may confidently assert is that faith is the opening that allows God, this unpredictable, unseen power, to travel in and out of the mind without all the pains of confusion.”

“Art should be pretentious. The place to be sincere is in one's relationships.”