Cultural Pretension Quotes

'Classic.' A book which people praise and don't read.

Prince Charles has doomed himself by so clearly wanting to be thought clever and cultured: the clever, cultured people don't buy it, and the people don't want a clever, cultured ruler.

We sing in English, not mimicking some American rock singer's accent. That's just pretending to be something you ain't.

In Hollywood we acquire the finest novels in order to smell the leather bindings.

I know of no sentence that can induce such immediate and brazen lying as the one that begins, 'Have you read - .'

I started to shed the monstrous aesthetic affectation of my youth so as to make room for the monstrous philistine postures of middle age, but it was some years before I was bold enough to decline an invitation to "Hamlet" on the grounds that I knew who won.

By vulgarity I mean that vice of civilization which makes man ashamed of himself and his next of kin, and pretend to be somebody else.

A great classic means a man whom one can praise without having read.

Ciao," I say casually, and flick my hair back. "Si. Ciao." I could so be Italian. Except I might have to learn a few more words.

But can I tell the genuine-article Italian from the poseur Italian? No. To me they all seem like poseurs.

My fake Japanese was smooth enough to earn me the title of 'The Emperor of Pleasing Graciousness' in that country.

In a way, it's taken me 25 years to acknowledge that I am from the West Coast. I was always sort of pretending I was bicoastal or that I really belonged on the East Coast.

I know that the arts are important. I'm not denying that, but I can't associate myself with all the claptrap that goes on around it.

Everyone wants to pretend like they sprang out of the ground with an Animal Collective record in their hands and a David Bowie haircut, and that's just not the case. You discover these things gradually.

The opera is like a husband with a foreign title - expensive to support, hard to understand and therefore a supreme social challenge.

The country is provincial; it becomes ridiculous when it tries to ape Paris.

I am a big theater fan. It's mostly just being pretentious, I think, and trying to look smart.

Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it.

I've decided to just keep doing Oh, Hello, where I play an older man who thinks he's very cultured. That clearly has not gone away.

People like abstract art because it makes them feel clever.

We're in a long line of English people pretending to be Americans and not being as good as Americans.

I think in the world of indie music there's this sort of false modesty.

A society person who is enthusiastic about modern painting or Truman Capote is already half a traitor to his class. It is middle-class people who, quite mistakenly, imagine that a lively pursuit of the latest in reading and painting will advance their status in the world.

If everybody is looking for it, then nobody is finding it. If we were cultured, we would not be conscious of lacking culture. We would regard it as something natural and would not make so much fuss about it. And if we knew the real value of this word we would be cultured enough not to give it so much importance.

Nobody of any real culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of sunset. Sunsets are quite old fashioned. To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament. Upon the other hand they go on.