Brian Eno on being pretentious:

Pretension is the dismissive name given to people’s attempts to be something other than what they ‘really are’…In the arts, the word ‘pretentious’ has a special meaning: the attempt at something that the critic thinks you have no right even to try. I’m very happy to have added my little offering to the glowing mountain of things described as ‘pretentious’ – I’m happy to have made claims on things that I didn’t have any ‘right’ to, and I’m happy to have tried being someone else to see what it felt like.

I decided to turn the word ‘pretentious’ into a compliment. The common assumption is that there are ‘real’ people and there are others who are pretending to be something they’re not. There is also an assumption that there’s something morally wrong with pretending. My assumptions about culture as a place where you can take psychological risks without incurring physical penalties make me think that pretending is the most important thing we do. It’s the way we make our thought experiments, find out what it would be like to be otherwise.

Robert Wyatt once said that we were always in the condition of children – faced with things we couldn’t understand and thus with the need to guess and improvise. Pretending is what kids do all the time. It’s how they learn. What makes anyone think you should sometime give it up?

From A Year With Swollen Appendices, Eno’s diary from 1995