The suburbs have this veneer of happiness, you know? This veneer of the ideal life. From afar, it's all together - white picket fence, nice house - but you peel away one little layer, and it all comes crumbling down.

I really like raw connections, and so I've always had a harder time in politics because I feel there's a lot of veneer around everything.

I like extreme situations: people pushed out of their comfort zones; the civil veneer stripped off.

Maybe there's a sort of veneer of optimism about U.S. comedy, whereas perhaps in England, we don't mind ending it on a sourer note.

I think there is this steely strength beneath this beautiful veneer that a lot of women possess. I can't fathom or understand it.

Wearing a veneer of perfection never did me any good.

After all, we are not French and never can be, and any attempt to be so is to deny our inheritance and to try to impose upon ourselves a character that can be nothing but a veneer upon the surface.

I like to show subjects inside a sealed veneer. There's a sense that you can't get in.

The purpose of satire has been rightly stated as to strip off the veneer of comforting illusion and cosy half truth, and our job, as I see it, is to put it back again!

No one finds it interesting to look at the person who is perfect all the time. They have no flaws. Flaws are what open us up to another person to show that we are not having a veneer, a fake sort of exterior.

Black Lives Matter is proving itself to seek only one end - and that is discord, alienation among Americans, rise in hate, and destruction of community bonds. The relative increase in justice afforded black Americans is of little concern, save as a convenient veneer for their anti-democratic mission.

Lucifer likes to have fun, but we need to make sure that he's also rooted in a proper journey. For the first few episodes after a pilot, you're just trying to establish your world and the starting points for your characters. But I feel like, as the stakes went up, the 'Lucifer' veneer got less and less.

I'm not tough, and I never have been. I suppose over the years I've built up kind of a veneer to protect myself because I have functioned on my own for a long, long time, and I have never had a lot of flunkies preceding me to clear the way.

There are loads of sociopolitical, racial, class and future-planet situations that really interest me, but I'm not really interested in making a film about them in a film that feels like reality because people view that in a different way. I like using science fiction to talk about subjects through the veneer of science fiction.

If you look at weak democracies, the oligarchies that have taken undue control of them always seek to tamper with the vote. It is important for oligarchs to have elections to give their guy a veneer of legitimacy - and important for the vote always to turn out 'their way.'

Under the veneer of Westernization, the cultures of the Indian world - which have existed for 30,000 years! - continue to live. Sometimes in a magical way, sometimes in the shadows.

I love the nooks and crannies of the American landscape; the back roads and back alleys, the places that are still untouched by the corporate gloss, the veneer of sameness that seems to be spreading across the country.

You feel a certain way in a glass or concrete or limestone building. It has an effect on your skin - the same with plywood or veneer, or solid timber. Wood doesn't steal energy from your body the way glass and concrete steal heat. When it's hot, a wood house feels cooler than a concrete one, and when it's cold, the other way around.

People are sad. People are broke. People are worried about money, people are worried that they're not enough and not amounting to anything and they don't feel good about themselves. People have rough times, and everybody's pretending it's not true, and we need to break that veneer.

The mainstream media spins stories that are largely racist, violent, and irresponsible - stories that celebrate power and demonize victims, all the while camouflaging its pedagogical influence under the cheap veneer of entertainment.