America is supposed to be given over to ugliness. There are a good many ugly things there and the ugliest are the most pretentious.
I was really pretentious in a sense and was like, 'I'm going to drama school to learn the craft.'
This sounds horribly pretentious, but I like to think that if music hadn't existed, I could have invented it.
After the many rumours that we had heard about Hitler and the published criticisms we had read about him, we were pleasantly impressed. His appearance was neither pretentious nor affected.
Early on, I said to myself that I would like to write a kind of moral and spiritual history of a place. It sounds a little pretentious, I know. But that's really what I set for myself.
Most actors really love it, that's what they want to do. They burn to do it. And so they'll read a script and think, that's an interesting part. And because they love acting, that blinds them to the fact that the rest of it is pretentious nonsense, which it very often is.
I never personalize anything because I think that can be dangerous. For me, the best way is - this may sound pretentious - but it's to breathe the character and get into the psychology of it.
When I was in college, I was a semiotics major, which is this hopelessly pretentious body of French literary theory.
When I started off with Trainspotting, it was the way the characters came to me. That's how they sounded to me. It seemed pretentious to sound any other way. I wasn't making any kind of political statement.
Who names themselves 'The Situation?' I do not take myself seriously like that - not in the least bit - that would be so pretentious.
