Top 35 Artifice Quotes

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 definitely dislike pomposity and artifice. I hope that I’m not that. Once I write a song, it belongs to the world, and the way people perceive it, it’s cool.

The intuitive connection children feel with animals can be a tremendous source of joy. The unconditional love received from pets, and the lack of artifice in the relationship, contrast sharply with the much trickier dealings with members of their own species.

Good writing is deceptive in that it hides its own artifice – it makes it seem easy.

I don’t see myself in terms of artifice. I see myself as a real person who chooses to live my life in an open way – artistically.

My lip curls in a snide reflex whenever I hear that a new novel is written from the point of view of a child or a monster, a lunatic or an animal. I immediately expect a nasty coyness of tone, cheesy artifice, the world through cardboard 3-D lenses.

I’ve never understood people who play up the artifice of music.

In some ways, it’s easier to be the lead. Week after week, scene after scene, the rhythms of filming force you to peel away a certain amount of artifice. When you’re on set that much, there’s a license to let the character emerge from the work itself.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

I always like to reveal the fact that the emperor has no clothes. And children are best at that. They teach us how to see the world in that sense. They are without artifice; they see it for what it is. I am drawn to that ruthless honesty.

There’s a great desire for people to alter themselves, but it’s also the art of transformation. ‘I want a bigger butt; I want bigger boobs.’ The artifice interests me – how we’re capable of altering ourselves. There’s a creative element that’s very intriguing.

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.

Nothing has been left undone by the enemies of freedom. Every art and artifice, every cruelty and outrage has been practiced and perpetrated to destroy the rights of man. In this great struggle, every crime has been rewarded and every virtue has been punished.

I felt from time to time that shooting live music is the most purely cinematic thing you can do. Ideally, the cinema is becoming one with the music. There is little artifice involved. There’s no acting. I love it.

Films are artifice. We’re telling stories on film. At the same time, when it works, there is a real tough immediacy and spontaneity to it, and a punch.

I think when you look at architectural photography it doesn’t help to have piles of old clothes lying on the floor. Architectural photography sets up an artifice.

Fiction accesses a certain kind of truth through artifice. I love to create worlds that operate on their own terms.

I don’t have stylistic loyalty. That’s why people perceive me changing all the time. But there is a real continuity in my subject matter. As an artist of artifice, I do believe I have more integrity than any one of my contemporaries.

In the ’50s, audiences accepted a level of artifice that the audiences in 1966 would chuckle at. And the audiences of 1978 would chuckle at what the audience of 1966 said was okay, too. The trick is to try to be way ahead of that curve, so they’re not chuckling at your movies 20 years down the line.

And the podcasting – I swear to you – on its worst day, the podcasts are better than our best films. Because they’re more imaginative, and there’s no artifice, and it’s far more real.

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.

At Roden Crater, I was interested in taking the cultural artifice of art out into the natural surround. I wanted the work to be enfolded in nature in such a way that light from the sun, moon and stars empowered the spaces. I wanted to bring culture to the natural surround as if one was designing a garden.

You know how someone – something – surprises you. You wake up a little bit. That’s done through Chinese cuisine – for example, through dishes of artifice. That’s a whole sub-tradition in Chinese cuisine. To create a dish that comes to the table looking like one thing but actually is something else.

The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.

So you might say, ‘Why do you end up making theatre in a world in which there is already too much of that? Creating layer upon layer of artifice?’ Perhaps the function is to pierce through that cloud and show reality – so the function of art is to make things – to show: ‘Hang on, this is real.’

I’m becoming more of a novelist as I get older. The novel just seems the truer form. There’s less artifice involved.

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.

Art lies by its own artifice.

Stripping away artifice – it’s the constant standard I aim for in acting, to approximate life. People talk about being bigger than life – but there’s nothing bigger than life.

Artifice is art.

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.

That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact.

To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.

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.

Well, all rock and roll is based in artifice.