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.
Rex Stout

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.
Jennifer Lopez

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

Gentlemen can now only behave as such, or be tolerated as such, in circumstances that are manifestly contrived or unreal.
Simon Raven

It destroys the soul to hear that you're all hype, that you have no talent, and that your whole career has been contrived.
Freddie Mercury

Life is made up of constant calls to action, and we seldom have time for more than hastily contrived answers.
Learned Hand

My country has contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.
John Adams

Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Pleasure and pain, though directly opposite are contrived to be constant companions.
Pierre Charron

Scientific theory is a contrived foothold in the chaos of living phenomena.
Wilhelm Reich

The anchors now made are contrived so as to sink into the ground as soon as they reach it, and to hold a great strain before they can be loosened or dislodged from their station.
William Falconer

The armored cars of dreams, contrived to let us do so many a dangerous thing.
Elizabeth Bishop

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.
John F. Kennedy

The wisdom of man never yet contrived a system of taxation that would operate with perfect equality.
Andrew Jackson

There is no private house in which people can enjoy themselves so well as at a capital tavern... No, Sir; there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.
Samuel Johnson

There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.
Samuel Johnson

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.
Jesse Eisenberg

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