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).
Abhijit Banerjee
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.
Ada Lovelace
I read contrived memoirs by presidential candidates. For every 'Dreams From My Father' - Barack Obama's honest, literary portrayal of his biracial upbringing - there were a dozen cautious, formulaic vanity projects by politicians.
Amy Chozick
The wisdom of man never yet contrived a system of taxation that would operate with perfect equality.
Andrew Jackson
I always try to find things worth saying, things that are supposed to be said instead of being contrived. I do a ton of writing.
Andy Grammer
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.
Ari Shaffir
I sing in five or six different voices that are all part of me. It's not contrived.
Axl Rose
I think there's a lot to be said about just enjoying your work. It can be very contrived when people say their work is for the good of mankind.
Ben Horowitz
I feel that if you made your writing too contrived to meet the market, it wouldn't be any good.
Cathy Marie Buchanan
I spent three and a half years writing the novel 'Chang & Eng,' about the conjoined brothers for whom the term 'Siamese twins' was contrived, and when I think of these afflicted people, my only emotion is one of profound sympathy.
Darin Strauss
After a while, a joke, if you say it too much, just becomes contrived, or fake-sounding.
Dave Chappelle
Usually, when Nirvana made music, there wasn't a lot of conversation. We wanted everything to be surreal. We didn't want to have some contrived composition.
Dave Grohl
I love diamond jewellery on men, and pocket scarves, cravats, cufflinks. The trick is to throw it together so it's natural and not contrived. That's real style.
David Furnish
There are a lot of challenges I undeniably have faced as a black person both in the U.K. and in the U.S. that contrived to make me feel lesser than what I am.
David Oyelowo
For the greater beauty of the instrument, the balls representing the planets are to be of considerable bigness; but so contrived, that they may be taken off at pleasure, and others, much smaller, and fitter for some purposes, put in their places.
David Rittenhouse
I live three blocks away from the beach, so every day I walk down to the beach to run or go swimming. Hiking is a big one for me - so long as it's something where I'm not thinking about working out, like in a contrived class or the gym.
Dylan Penn
You know as a scientist that both were developed completely independently of each other in the laboratories. And only afterward were the political situations contrived out of which they could be justified.
E. P. Thompson
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.
Edgar Wright
The armored cars of dreams, contrived to let us do so many a dangerous thing.
Elizabeth Bishop
It's not about how much movement you do, how much interaction there is, it just reeks of credibility if it's real. If it's contrived, it seems to work for a while for the people who can't filter out the real and unreal.
Fred Durst
It destroys the soul to hear that you're all hype, that you have no talent, and that your whole career has been contrived.
If anyone can crack the publicity nut and figure out how to not come across hammy and contrived, I'd love to talk to them.
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.
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.
I don't know if it's because my sensitivity is through the roof, but I can't stand contrived dialogue anymore.
But from the time I was very little, it was something I would do all the time, just sing, dance and act. So it wasn't something that was fake or contrived as I got older.
When playing a role, I would feel more comfortable, as you're given a prescribed way of behaving. So, both Facebook and theatre provide contrived settings that provide the illusion of social interaction.
I had great difficulty in school interacting with others, and I took refuge in the contrived setting of play acting, which is what I still do.
Old school fans are going to be shocked at just how much of the pro wrestling they grew up watching was, indeed, contrived, manipulated or, as it's called in the business, 'worked.'
My country has contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.
The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.
I like to learn the lines and not get any precontrived things in my head about the part. Just get on stage and see what the other actors are doing, and respond to them as honestly as I can.
Making the solution seem so completely inevitable and obvious, so uncontrived and natural - it's so hard!
Sitcom storylines are usually incredibly contrived.
That's what has always been so surprising for The Seekers - when you think they try to create pop stars in a contrived, manufactured way and we were just four people who just happened to meet and sing together.
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.
We were very creative. There was nothing contrived about us. No one telling us what to do, what to wear, what to sing. We wrote our own material, chose our producers.
Life is made up of constant calls to action, and we seldom have time for more than hastily contrived answers.
Your look shouldn't be contrived.
I don't really see how any song can not feel contrived if it isn't honest, and how could I write honest songs if I don't write about stuff going on in my life and how I'm feeling?
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.
Capra is an old-time movie craftsman, the master of every trick in the bag, and in many ways he is more at home with the medium than any other Hollywood director. But all of his details give the impression of contrived effect.
Beauty and femininity are ageless and can't be contrived, and glamour, although the manufacturers won't like this, cannot be manufactured. Not real glamour; it's based on femininity.
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.
I never liked dance photography; it's very flat, and dance photography in the studio looks very contrived.
I don't see any division between the comic and the tragic. I feel like I'm writing about serious things, and humour is one of my tools. It's not contrived, just part of my world, part of the way things are to me.
If a character's suddenly spouting information that's supposed to bring you up to date, it can seem artificial or contrived.
What a blessed thing it is, that Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left!
Pleasure and pain, though directly opposite are contrived to be constant companions.
A character who is thought-out is not born, he or she is contrived. A born character is round, a thought-out character is flat.
