Defence Quote by James Murphy

“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

The literary world is so full of pretension, and there's such an enormous gap between how seriously poets take themselves and how widely they're…

— Billy Collins

“The characteristic feature of contemporary literary radicalism is that it rarely addresses the question of its own determination by the conditions of its production…

— Aijaz Ahmad

“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

“Nothing more aggravating than a seamless, unremitting irony which leaves you no time to breathe and still less to think; which instead of being…

— Emil M. Cioran

In England, literary pretence is more universal than elsewhere from our method of education.

— James Payn

The world is a collective madhouse, its inhabitants are merely faking sanity. It is critical to becoming aware of these aberrations, for pretensions can…

— John Astin

There must always be some pretentiousness about literature, or else no one would take its pains or endure its disappointments.

— Glenway Wescott

Ironic philosophies produce passionate works.

— Albert Camus

I was not interested in irony; I wanted to emphasize the primacy of the idea in making art

— Sol LeWitt

Irony is a disciplinarian feared only by those who do not know it, but cherished by those who do

— Soren Kierkegaard

Such a superiority do the pursuits of literature possess above every other occupation, that even he who attains but a mediocrity in them, merits…

— David Hume