10 Quotes Tagged: insincerity

Even his conversation was, as it were, a spoken part.

"I am always saying "Glad to've met you" to somebody I'm not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though."

I let him run on, this papier-maché Mephistopheles, and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe.

The reciprocal civility of authors is one of the most risible scenes in the farce of life.

The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!

Normally, anything done in the name of 'the kids' strikes me as either slightly sentimental or faintly sinister — that redolence of moral blackmail that adheres to certain charitable appeals and certain kinds of politician. (Not for nothing is baby-kissing the synonym for public insincerity.)

The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don’t — whichever seems likelier to win an effect.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.

Where the questions of religion are concerned people are guilty of every possible kind of insincerity and intellectual misdemeanor.

True cynics kill themselves. The rest are posers, trying to use clever sarcasm and snarky remarks to hide insecurity and the fear that if they put themselves out there, they will fail.