Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The pocket square, properly contrived, finishes a man's look. With good tailoring and well chosen neckwear, the look connotes power, taste, refinement, manners. The naked pocket connotes the opposite: working class, tasteless, base, crude, ignorant.
I have got a scheme to make a thing in the form of a horse with a steam engine in the inside so contrived as to move an immense pair of wings, fixed on the outside of the horse, in such a manner as to carry it up into the air while a person sits on its back.
If one of my romantic-comedy colleagues had written and directed 'Love Actually,' they would have been torn limb from limb. I thought it was awful, contrived, dreadful. I could see every twist and turn. I thought it was despicable. It was the writing that got me.
Mel Brooks is an interesting one because he started out making films about stuff that he was totally affectionate about, like musicals, westerns, horror films, Hitchcock films. And then, as they get further on, and you get to 'Spaceballs,' then it's just kind of contrived.
There is nothing remotely dignified about sorting through rotting trash to find something to feed your child, or asking someone for money because you have none (anyone who has contrived to give people money before they had to ask will never forget the look of gratitude in their eyes).
I'm a socially concerned citizen of India. I have strong views on issues of social and political relevance. But it's very difficult to voice it in an intelligent manner without it sounding contrived. Because people think you're saying or doing all this as a PR exercise, not from your heart.
Early on, I had a girlfriend come see me, and she was like, 'Yeah, it was good, but you were funny at a dining hall at the University of Maryland.' That's when I realized I was contrived. I was reciting jokes. So I really worked on - no matter what - sounding like I was just talking to the people.
Mainly, I hope to inspire honesty. We live in a space where so much can be manipulated, and so much is expected to be manipulated - curated, contrived, edited. I think that's a real detriment to self expression and happiness in a lot of ways. In my mind, honesty and vulnerability is the way forward.
You can tell if there's magic in something. When you start it, you want to finish it and you want it to be perfect. If you're not inspired, and you're working hard to pull inspiration from somewhere and make a song something it's not, then it's very contrived, and I don't like to write music that's contrived.
The truth is that the greatest innovations in health-care delivery haven't come from federally contrived oligopolies or enormous hospital chains. Novel concepts - whether practice-management companies, home health care or the first for-profit HMO - almost always have come from entrepreneurial firms, often backed by venture capital.
Pele featured in the Brazilophile imaginary as the a figure of non-utile excess, a carefree artist in the Nietzschean sense, indifferent to the narrow teleology of winning matches... check the way that most of the endlessly replayed footage we see of Pele is not of him scoring goals, but audaciously missing chances contrived by force of wit.
To show that a comedian on stage in India talking about sanitation or in South Africa talking about HIV and AIDS awareness, if you follow the joke into their lives, you can see that, like, oh, these things aren't just contrived in joke books. This is real life. I think the best comedians have that bravery and courage to say, Oh, this is what it is.