Quotes About Artifice

Art is an artifice that you try to make seem natural.

Art isn't life, you know. It if were, the world would go up in flames. It's artifice. By definition.("Talking In The Dark")

An ad that pretends to be art is—at absolute best—like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This

Stripped of the cunning artifices of the tailor, and standing forth in the garb of Eden - what a sorry set of round-shouldered, spindle-shanked, crane-necked varlets would civilized men appear!

Realism...has no more to do with reality than anything else.

The great artifice of regarding small deviations from the truth as being the truth itself is at the same time the foundation of wit, where the whole thing would often collapse if we were to regard these deviations in a spirit of philosophical rigor.

To me, 'X Factor' is like Vegas. Fake, twisted, but kind of wonderful. Maybe I'm sick, but I find the whole thing quite funny sometimes.

All of Vegas is false. There's a false Paris, a false Venice, a false Baghdad - in fact, all of the early Vegas aesthetic is Baghdad, which is also the irony. It's 'Aladdin,' the sands, 'One Thousand and One Nights.'

I had become a perfect fake human, saying the stupid and pointless things that humans say to each other all day long.

Anybody can be charming if they don`t mind faking it.

I did plays in college, and I have half of a play. But I'm kind of stuck. I keep revisiting it so maybe it will move somewhere. There's something about plays where you can feel that sense of artifice at any moment.

Language leads a double life - and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs, and so on. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form - as the stuff of patterned artifice.

The hoax is the very absence of truth, which usually means art is absent, too - hoaxes regularly substitute claims of reality for imagination, facts for form, acting as if artifice is the antithesis of art.

A arte de agradar é a arte de enganar.

Art, like theology, a packaged fraud.

It make one's mouth hurt to speak with such forced merriment.

Now to think of concrete as both natural and artificial demands a greater degree of mental agility than most of us can manage. So much is invested in the absoluteness of this distinction between natural and artificial , so necessary is it to our whole cosmology, that to admit that something can be both of these would be just too anxious-inducing. To avoid this, we habitually operate on the assumption that concrete is just artificial, or alternatively, just natural, but never both.

Men are so easily drawn to fake things.

I am the first suckling among multa, your artifice, your animal, gaudy with cries, gaudy with hunger and lovely with hunger and hunger.

If being two-faced is an art form, I couldn't count how many fu..ing artists I'd know.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity.

It is the destiny of things real to destroy those that are artifice.

I've masqueraded as a literary critic, and with a great deal more success, but criticism isn't real—it's not a real thing.

Everybody is in drag.