Quotes About Pretense

Well, you know what they say in Hollywood - the most important thing is being sincere, even if you have to fake it.

Coming from L.A. to D.C., I'm always impressed that in D.C., people are doing the things that the people in L.A. are pretending to do. Whenever I'm in D.C., I ask people what they do, and they say, 'I'm with the agency, or I'm with State.' In L.A., I ran into a guy who said, 'I'm working on an audition for a guy who happens to be with an agency.'

The most important thing in acting is honesty. If you can fake that, you've got it made.

Everybody thinks that actors would be really good at bluffing, but I think it's a little backward.

I think that episode in the third season was great. I'm really glad that we did that. He got to sleep with Sydney and kill Evil Francie and go on a mission and pretend he's a rock star.

I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me.

To compensate for this undercurrent of uselessness, we pretend we're all terribly important and that we have something to bring to the world.

I know now it is children who accept life; grown people cover it up and pretend it is different with drinks.

He thought of his old tapes, the ones he'd had for years, the ones he'd used over and over again. Their silence was always different to the silence of a new tape: it was loaded, prickly with things recorded and erased; a silence that was like ghosts. That house was an old tape masquerading as a new one. It had recorded and erased, but it was pretending it had just come out of the cellophane. It had ghosts, but it wasn't owning up to them.

Boys like it when you talk to them as if they were grown men—at least he always did when he was a kid—because they pretend that's what they are anyhow, grown-up men, and they do it for their entire lives.

The hardest life in the world is to be constantly putting yourself out into the world like you are joyful when you are not. When you are not happy, to show everybody that you are happy, it costs phenomenal amount of life.

I have wife who understands, or even if she doesn't she at least pretends.

La vanidad que se exalta bajo capa de modestia es la más insoportable de todas.

Here's champagne for our real friends, and real pain for our sham friends.

I believe that everyone else my age is an adult whereas I am merely in disguise.

They are hypocrites, they think the Church is a cage to keep God in, so he will stay locked up there and not go wandering about the earth during the week, poking his nose into their business, and looking in the depths and darkness and doubleness of their hearts, and their lack of true charity; and they believed they need only be bothered about him on Sundays when they have their best clothes on and their faces straight, and their hands washed and their gloves on, and their stories all prepared.

In theory I can do almost anything; certainly I have been told how. In practice I do as little as possible. I pretend to myself that I would be quite happy in a hermit's cave, living on gruel, if someone else would make the gruel. Gruel, like so many other things, is beyond me.

That birthday was the day I discovered that I was a fraud. Or not a fraud, like a bad magician: a fake, like a fake antique. I was a forgery, done on purpose.

Once she wasn't supposed to like it. To have her in a position she didn't like, that was power. Even if she liked it she had to pretend she didn't. Then she was supposed to like it. To make her do something she didn't like and then make her like it, that was greater power. The greatest power of all is when she doesn't really like it but she's supposed to like it, so she has to pretend.

I think of her as a woman for whom every act is done for show, is acting rather than a real act. She does such things to look good, I think. She's out to make the best of it.

Disguise is easier when you're young.

If in doubt, play dumb," said Ada

Is there no end to his diguises of benevolence?

I'm tired of everlastingly being unnatural and never doing anything I want to do. I'm tired of acting like I don't eat more than a bird, and walking when I want to run and saying I feel faint after a waltz, when I could dance for two days and never get tired. I'm tired of saying, 'How wonderful you are!' to fool men who haven't got one-half the sense I've got, and I'm tired of pretending I don't know anything, so men can tell me things and feel important while they're doing it.