“Being pretentious is rarely harmful to anyone. Accusing others of it is. You can use the word “pretentious” as a weapon with which to bludgeon other people’s creative efforts, but in shutting them down the accusation will shatter in your… — Dan Fox Copy Share Image
There's a sense of knowing when to stop and take a break from things, to step back from the work you're making, and of… — Dan Fox Copy Share Image
“Try describing a few of the most wildly successful pop albums of the twentieth century without mentioning the artist and title. A concept rock… — Dan Fox Copy Share Image
“Why can’t a musician try to make a cinematic “state of the nation” poem told through dream imagery and pop music? They may fail… — Dan Fox Copy Share Image
“Claims to ordinariness and salt-of-the-earth virtue—“slumming it,” as it’s crudely called—are themselves pretentious. The assumption that dropping your aitches or asserting a love of… — Dan Fox Copy Share Image
“The intellectually insecure drop the word “pretentious” to shut down a conversation they don’t understand, when simply saying “I don’t know” or asking “Can… — Dan Fox Copy Share Image
“The accuser of pretension always presumes bad intentions. Truth is, more often than not pretension is simply someone trying to make the world more… — Dan Fox Copy Share Image
“Pretentiousness shares with sophistication a lingering sense of “unnaturalness”; something faked, pretending, tampered with. Litvak presses the idea that sophistication is linked to perversion… — Dan Fox Copy Share Image
“Pretension is a question of optics. The pessimist sees pretension as a sham. The optimist views it as innocent, tragicomic, an excess of effort.… — Dan Fox Copy Share Image
I think that one way of diffusing an insult is to turn it around and laugh at yourself - that's a way of coping… — Dan Fox Copy Share Image
The contortions and games of identity that politicians play on themselves almost everyday is kind of extraordinary. Trump, for instance, speaks like a five-year-old… — Dan Fox Copy Share Image
“The pretentious flaws of others affirm your own intellectual or aesthetic expertise. Simultaneously, their fakery highlights the contours of your down-to-earth character and virtuous… — Dan Fox Copy Share Image
“Not every artist can make a masterpiece, yet it’s the experiments that quietly stumble forward that lead to them. There’s an altogether more generous… — Dan Fox Copy Share Image
