Jean de la Bruyere Quotes

Reality doesn't have any preconceived ideas. You've got to learn how to smoke the cigarette, not act smoking the cigarette. You need to drink the drink, not act drinking the drink. You've got to do things and not show them.

Even a man's exact imitation of the song of the nightingale displeases us when we discover that it is a mimicry, and not the nightingale.

Affectation is an awkward and forced imitation of what should be genuine and easy, wanting the beauty that accompanies what is natural.

It's important to find what really suits who you are, because style isn't only what you wear, it's what you project.

Rare is the human being, immature or mature, who has never felt an impulse to pretend he is some one or something else.

Whatever brief delights it provides, mere strangeness in poetry and prose eventually leaves us cold, especially when we suspect the writer is stretching for effect to avoid the actual life before his eyes.

One cost, for the lonely: If you want to be interesting, the one thing you shouldn't do is really focus on the fact that 'I want this person to like me.' That's going to make you very uninteresting. But the lonely, they just can't help but focus on that.

Being natural is one of the most irritating poses I know in people.

The reason I don't like realist, photorealist, neorealist, or whatever, is that I am as interested in the artificial as I am in the real.

Style equals pretense.

I'm no model lady. A model's just an imitation of the real thing.

Nothing hinders a thing from being natural so much as the straining ourselves to make it seem so.

If you try to make things happen, they start to feel presented. They start to feel premeditated.

If you're trying too hard to be the girl next door, you're not going to be.

For me, luxury isn't just the real thing. It's also fake. Swarovski crystals or real diamonds? It's a game.

Sometimes when you really try to be earnest, everything disappears. If you really try to make a romantic movie, the first thing that goes out the window is the romance or real passion. It suddenly becomes cute-ville or cozy-ville. It's another world other than life.

Artifice is art.

My image is dark and sombre. It fits my personality. The problem I always had with the people in the Misfits was that it was a put-on. You wouldn't see those guys walking around like that.

I'm not a big fan of just cultivating an image.

I don't have a lot of time for things that are deliberately, achingly cool.

I like being photographed without glasses. I don't want to be pretentious.

If a person is in front of a camera, they're acting. It's not possible to live in front of a camera.

We want to be presentable and respectable, but feel like we can talk freely about what we want to sing about - we don't need to cuss to have that bad-boy attitude, I guess.

Tony Blair adopted the accent of the audience he was speaking to, which worked very well initially, but then voters began to perceive him as phoney. The 'man of the people' act is the height of condescension.

There are parts of us we stylize and present to the world. And there are parts of us that we don't stylize and are just natural. And they don't just hang in a jarring way, hopefully, but there's an interrelationship between them.