Here the dominant quality of his thought was incredulous and self-amused.

The smile was a little too self-amused, Kovac thought.

The voice that came back, welling up from the bottom of the stairs, was silly-young and self-amused.

Mutanen wanted to top 50,000 Facebook friends because self-amused self-promotion is what all the cool kids are doing these days.

The self-amused malice had faded from his voice.

Her self-amused and slightly lascivious thoughts wafted away like fog in a high wind.

They were frozen-her mouth a softly compressed 'o', he with an odd, self-amused look on his face.

At first, he answered the Council-men's and Jokan's questions with a little self-amused smile.

But she lacks the self-aware, self-amused irony that gave Ms. Alexander's performance its bite.

There is an anticipatory touch of the self-amused drama queens of Tennessee Williams.

If you're a New York radio fan of a certain order, you know that rich, rolling, deeply self-regarding and self-amused chuckle.

We have named the campaign 'Operation Round-Up,'" he said with a self-amused grin. "

The old-fashioned euphemism "distaff side" marks one of several moments of self-amused anthropomorphism.

He smiled slightly, self-amused.

It's the self-amused, self-dramatizing and finally self-aware survivor that Ms. Ashley pulls to the surface here.

It is hard to imagine a greater contrast than the one between Alberti's aloof gaze and Erasmus's gentle, self-amused smile.

"Sing it like you mean it?" asked Neil Young, responding to something shouted from the crowd, pulling an incredulous, self-amused face.

The wild-eyed Christian, with his explosive tantrums and self-amused laughs, wears his tics like a suit of armor.

On the other hand, Memling has made Tommaso's young wife, Maria, with her fashionably shaved forehead and self-amused smile, extremely appealing.

Modelling a succession of gasp-provoking Balmain outfits, Sian Phillips maintains a nice, self-amused poise as his wife.

A self-amused smirk displayed the pleasure the wily Klingon took in baiting the cantankerous MD. "A human expression, I believe."

But this high-grade pulp entertainment is too delectably amusing and self-amused, and far too aware of its own outrageous conceits to sustain such a dolorous verdict.

Still, it can be enough just to watch Mr. Pearce — with a shrug, a downward glance and a flickering, self-amused smile — build a character from so little.