Artifice Quotes

The first actor who really blew me away was Paul Scofield in (the movie) A Man for All Seasons (1966). I`d never seen such integrity in acting, and it struck me as a fascinating paradox because acting is artifice. It can be argued to be entirely false. I thought, how can an actor suggest such truth?

I was 10 years old. Dad used to take us on location so the family wouldn`t be split up, so we were with him in the Philippines. That`s when the heart attack happened. He came back so pale and sick, so weak and thin, seeming so much older, and walking with a cane. This world of fantasy and artifice that I`d known suddenly was about real life and death, about the potential loss of a parent. It didn`t make any sense to me. It was enough to keep me away from acting for a long time. - On his father`s heart attack filming Apocalypse Now (1979).

The heart`s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good; and thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burdens of the past.

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.

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

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

IF we bestow but a very little attention to the economy of the animal creation, we shall find manifest examples of premeditation, perseverance, resolution, and consumate artifice, in order to effect their purpose.

Everything is artifice or illusion.

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.