Artistic Pretension Quotes

He who pretends to be either painter or engraver without being a master of drawing is an imposter.

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.

As refined fare serves a hungry man as well as and no better than coarser food, the more pretentious artist will not dream of inviting the hungry man to his meal.

Goethe said that the worst thing in art is technical facility accompanied by triteness. Many an artist, like God, has never needed to think twice about anything. His works are the mad scene from Giselle , on ice skates: he weeps, pulls out his hair holding his wrists like Lifar and tells you what Life is, all at a gliding forty miles an hour.

Here's how I understand music. If you can play the same bunch of noise twice, it's music. To go beyond that is supercilious and pontificating.

I don't like pretentious films or pretentious people.

Arty. To me the word's got as much venom associated with it as 'wacky'.

Everyone knows of the talking artists. Throughout all of the known history of the world they have gathered in rooms and talked. They talk of art and are passionately,almost feverishly, in earnest about it. They think it matters much more than it does.

Lots of men are like that, their artistic leanings never go beyond a weakness for shapely thighs.

I would rather die than be a serious artist, or a fake artist.

The pretentiousness of literature really annoys me; the way a writer is held as this sort of magical person to be revered on the stage. Everything I do on tour is to try and destroy that pretense.

Many intelligent people, when about to write . . . , force on their minds a certain notion about style, just as they screw up their faces when they sit for their portraits.

In college, I think I probably positioned myself as an aspiring writer, meaning I dressed sort of extravagantly and adopted all the semi-Byronic affectations, as if I were writing, although I wasn't actually doing any writing.

Literary modernism kind of grew out of a sense that, “Oh my god! I’m telling a story! Oh, that can’t be the case, because I’m a clever person. I’m a literary person! What am I going to do to distinguish myself? I know! I’ll write Ulysses.”

But an artist, he realized. Or rather so-called artist. Bohemian. That's closer to it. The artistic life without the talent.

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

There are directors who desire to be artistic. It is pathetic to compare the seriousness of their aim with the absurdity of their attainment.

I think I've committed the one really bad English crime, which is I've risen above my station. I was supposed to be a pop star, and suddenly I'm claiming that I'm an artist of some kind.

There are all kinds of pretensions about art, but I'm just a guy who sings for his supper.

All the lousy little poets coming around trying to sound like Charles Manson.

Artistic credentials are au courant in the important business of being seen as cultured, elegant and, of course, stupendously rich.

I had learned to harness ignorance with presumption. I was ready to become an unacknowledged watercolorist.

I am a born novelist, which does not happen all that often. There are people who try to write for a certain time, then they become Ministers of Culture under de Gaulle, and they begin living their own fictions.

In Hollywood the man who cleans your pool is an actor. The man who sells you your copy of Variety is an actor. I don't think there's a real person left in the place.

You take the risk of being rejected. If you have pretentions to be an artist of any kind, you have to take the risk of people rejecting you and thinking you're an arsehole.