Top 334 Pretentious Quotes & Sayings

I meditate - very pretentious - and I try to read as much as I can and swim at the Y.

I made a choice that I was not going to be a pretentious writer.

I never want to be pretentious.

Certainly, anybody who says, "in the eyes of God," is pretentious.

The truth is so simple that it is regarded as a pretentious banality.

Films are always pretentious. There's nothing more pretentious than a filmmaker.

I was a pretty pretentious kid. I was always making art.

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.

[Depp] has real ambitions, but he is deeply afraid of being considered pretentious.

Fierce language and pretentious advances are signs that the enemy is about to retreat.

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

When I come to a new city is I combine: I say, well, it's like Barcelona and Edinburgh, though I can't imagine what that would be. But Toronto, the last few times I've been here, what always comes up is Chicago and West Berlin. It's a big, sprawling city beside a lake, of a certain age and a certain architectural complexity. But the high-end retail core looks more like West Germany than the Magnificent Mile. Yonge Street is like K-Damm. There's an excess of surface marble and bronze: it's Germanic and as pretentious as pretentious can be.

It sounds a bit pretentious, but I'm never really conscious of what I'm doing musically.

I was really pretentious in a sense and was like, 'I'm going to drama school to learn the craft.'

No one wants to be pretentious about what they do or take it seriously, because that is just weird.

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

The worst thing for a filmmaker is for a film to be labeled as pretentious or heavy-handed.

I'm a pretentious coffee snob, and I love Starbucks. Gotta have my skim latte.

Without wishing to sound pretentious, my basic standard of happiness is to do with being who I am.

I was a really pretentious teenager.

I hope I never get to point where I'm not real, where I'm pretentious.

When I was in college, I was a semiotics major, which is this hopelessly pretentious body of French literary theory.

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.

There are some people I've met and it's stressful just speaking to them, because they're really pretentious and I don't know how to talk to them without being pretentious back.

...if use is not an appropriate criterion for decision making in the academic life, what is? Love. ...The virtues of love as a criterion for choosing a college major...it is not pretentious. "Use" is pretentious because it claims to know something about the future that it doesn't really know. Love is immediate... [love] guarantees that you will work to your highest potential...it is part of who you are, and not just something you think, often wrongly, that you can use.

I was a pretentious teenager, so of course I had, you know, 'Raging Bull' posters and all of that. 'Raging Bull' is not a pretentious movie, but me having the poster was a pretentious action. I even grew a goatee and had a Knicks cap, because I thought I wanted to be like Spike Lee.

Instead of sounding pretentious, phony, or repetitive, I'd rather not speak.

I don't deal in pretentious kids' parties.

What I'm bringing to the pop table is that I'm not pretentious.

I find a lot of young filmmakers make too much of an effort to be trendy and they can be pretentious.

Wow. I am really pretentious.

I do consider myself to be something of a pretentious wanker.

I have a dread of sounding pretentious and try not to talk too much about what I do.

I hate people thinking I'm some pretentious fraud.

Don't call me a journalist; I hate the word. It's pretentious!

I used to be a pretentious little jerk, running around saying 'I'm going to be an awktor.'

It felt like a pretentious fantasy to say, 'I want to be an actress.'

I'm a concert pianist, that's a pretentious way of saying I'm unemployed at the moment.

My secret dream is to write an epic poem. That's probably the most pretentious thing I've said.

It's not my personality to brag in any way or be pretentious. It's just not my nature.

This sounds horribly pretentious, but I like to think that if music hadn't existed, I could have invented it.

No one would argue against the fact that L.A. leads the country in opportunities for being hip and pretentious.

Our business is infested with idiots who try to impress by using pretentious jargon.

I'm very proud of myself on my, whatever the literacy is, I'm pretentious, totally pretentious. I like to say 'hmm', for example.

I don't like pretentious films or pretentious people.

I'd love to do a Michel Gondry film. That would be ideal! I'd love to do an Almodovar film; you know, I think he's very, very talented. I don't care that people say he's pretentious. So what? He's a good director; he can be pretentious.

I must have been a really pretentious little girl.

Anyone without a sense of humor is too pretentious to be a good magician.

I think it's pretentious to create art just for the sake of stroking the artists ego.

You live for pretentious metaphors.

If I were pretentious I would say that I'm not an average person. But really, I know how that is.

In England you're skewered on the altar of pop culture if you become pretentious.

Yes, of course we were pretentious -- what else is youth for?

I don't wanna sound pretentious talking about myself.

I don't want to get pretentious, but there's an art to doing sitcoms; you have to make it work in that format.

Elton John himself never seems pretentious but Bernie Taupin's lyrics often do - sometimes pretentious in a clever sort of way, but pretentious nonetheless. There is a conflict between Elton's and Bernie's personal styles, no doubt about it.

You are only pretentious if you are not sincere.

People are too pretentious in France to like Sarkozy. But he'd be a fabulous president for America.

I am hard to disgust, but a pretentious poet can do it

I want to paint. That is probably going to sound so pretentious coming from someone who's been a musician.