Quotes About Artifice

In the theater there is often a tension, almost a contradiction, between the way real people would think and behave, and a kind of imposed dramaticness.

In the theatre, we're all charlatans and liars and scavengers and fly-by-nights.

We are shallow because our media are so horribly shallow. Every morning, I peruse the papers, and there is so little to read in them. It is the same with radio - all that noise, that artifice.

I believe in low light and trick mirrors. I believe in plastic surgery.

I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They're beautiful. Everybody's plastic, but I love plastic.

I felt as though the past and the future, cause and effect, patterns and connections, were a huge complicated artifice, and it was only by my efforts that they kept going. If I gave up it would all dissolve into the raw chaos of the senses. That's all we really have. The rest is romanticism and storytelling. But we need those stories. I guess I do.

to discover day in an artful woman's heart. Nothing can be weaker, in the eye of an observer, who himself disdains artifice, than a woman who makes artifice her study. In such a departure from honest nature, there will be such curvings, that the eyes, the countenance, must ever betray the heart; while the lips, either breaking out into apologies, or aiming at reserve, confirm the suspicion, that all is not right in the mind.

While authenticity is the "real you," vulnerability is that "you" naked—that is, who you are without artifice.

That's the thing I loved about drag queens, life was a constant movie; no matter how ridiculously things didn't match they would sacrifice everything for the pose, and I was definitely into the pose.

The irony is that you can't use real rain to make movies.

Films are about lies. They're about making things look glamorous.

Today we no longer have any pity for the concept of free will: we know only too well what it really is — the foulest of all theologians' artifices, aimed at making mankind responsible in their sense, that is, dependent upon them. Here I simply supply the psychology of all making responsible.

For me and my drag, I think camp is about exaggeration and artifice and the celebration of superficiality. A lot of my fans look up to me as a figure of femininity but that's all artifice. That's all fake and that's campy within itself, and so that's what resonates to me: the seriousness and the funniness and the artifice and the exaggeration.

They both were liars. Both led lives camouflaged in artifice. But Saugandhi was happy. Someone who cannot afford real gold will gladly settle for artificial jewelry.

Hollywood has nothing to do with real life.

Gustavo Solivellas dice: "Se requiere mucha inteligencia para disfrazar de artificio las propias emociones" (Arturo Pérez-Reverte)

Goûtons un peu ce simulacre de bonheur

The conventional use of words and of narrative structure is deliberately subverted in decadent fiction; language deviates from the established norms in an attempt to reproduce pathology on a textual level. With its emphasis on aberration and artifice, the decadents' approach to the language of fiction frequently leans towards the baroque and the obscure.

Adornment, exoticism, affectation are all willed decadent strategies meant to pervert the texts they made. Decadent texts often live in their descriptive excursions, in their evocation of dreams, mysterious places and states of mind, in their excess of words, not events. The surface of the texts, the sound of the words, point to themselves as manufactured, as illusion. The decadents attempted to create texts that announced themselves as artifice.

Reality is the richest thing there is, the most important thing there is. Our imagination allows us to live an artificial life that is wonderful, extremely rich, but I don't believe any artist would dare to say that artifice is better than real life.

The greatest Scholars are not the wisest men,' as once unto the wolf thus spoke the mare. Of all their artifice, I account not a whit.

I tell you I have created this thing out of the squashed cabbage leaves of Covent Garden; and now she pretends to play the fine lady with me.

It is not that female characters in the modern novel are characterizations of bad or limited people—although, incidentally, they almost always are—but that they are badly drawn, because the writers flatly refuse to apply the same complex of literary artifice in their character realizations to both males and females—out of habits that begin as a response to some terror that human individuation would make the female characters equal to the males.

Happy unions cannot take root under such a cloud of deception and artifice.