Top 35 Postmodern Quotes

I like to blur the line between fact and fiction, but not to condescend to the reader by enmeshing her/him into some sort of a postmodern coop.

Los Angeles is a true postmodern city. Here, we celebrate with equal aplomb the high and the low. I am just as influenced by the punk rock attitude of local skate and surf cultures as I am by old-school glamour and stardust.

Mystery Science Theater is really a postmodern show, it’s really derived of many influences.

I’m a postmodern commentator, and so, in a cheeky parallel to James Joyce or James Kelman, I get to places, verbally, that are a little unusual – when I talk about Jocky Wilson and end up sounding like a Jackson Pollock of the commentary box.

Postmodern comedy doesn’t work well with very old audiences, because it’s making fun of the comedy they enjoy.

One of the stated goals of the postmodern movement in architecture was a greater sensitivity to the people who live in or use newly designed buildings.

I grew up in the heat of ’70s postmodern fiction and post-Godard films, and there was this idea that what mattered was the theory or meta in art.

We sometimes forget that human invention can also be a subject of human invention: that might seem a modern notion, or a postmodern one, but novelists have taken time – sometimes time out from their realist fixations – to source and satirise the speech and power we rely on.

I’m really into architecture, I’m a member of the Brutalist Appreciation Society; I’m a member of the Postmodern Society. I write letters to save buildings.

This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.

I am just postmodern enough not to trust ‘postmodern’ as a description of our times, for it privileges the practices and intellectual formations of modernity. Calling this a postmodern age reproduces the modernist assumption that history must be policed by periods.

That stupid postmodern emphasis on image over content has slammed us right into a dramaturgy that willfully leaves the audience behind and then resents the fact that they don’t ‘get it.’

What is Southern California but an ever-changing dreamscape backdrop for the postmodern ideal? The psychology of the postmodern world is the continual state of change as we live in its idealist manufactured dream, built by developers.

There are some beautiful books out there. But the ones that leave me cold are the ones where I feel – it’s that postmodern thing – it’s more experimentation with language than it is a deep compassionate falling into another human being‘s experience.

The body of work I create combines traditional storylines and postmodern narrative strategies to approach themes such as belonging, identity politics and conflict, as well as the push towards – and resistance against – modernization.

The Spirit is a kind of postmodern loner hero. He comes from nowhere; he has no real relationship to anything.

I realized that my truest passion was for helping people change through faith in a higher power. That meant, for me, belonging to the church. Using my abilities to bring Christian doctrine to a postmodern world.

Many of the contradictions in Postmodern art come from the fact that we’re trying to be artists in a democratic society. This is because in a democracy, the ideal is compromise. In art, it isn’t.

The legacy of the fairy story in my brain is that everything will work out. In fiction it would be very hard for me, as a writer, to give a bad ending to a good character, or give a good ending to a bad character. That’s probably not a very postmodern thing to say.

The Chavez-Obama pictures will join a postmodern photo array that includes Donald Rumsfeld gifting Saddam Hussein with spurs from President Reagan.

The deconstructed, postmodern pizza has been with us for ages, and the fact is that pretty much every ingredient in the world has been used as a pizza topping and liked by somebody, somewhere.

The films I grew up loving, and the art that I love, is not generally the kind of postmodern ironic winking stuff. What lasts is the stuff in which the artists are totally in league with the subject.

Does art have to have high foot traffic to get funded in a recession? A lot of people, I am sure, would say absolutely not. And those postmodern art-loving loners surely would argue that even if one person likes a piece of art, that would make a museum worthwhile.

Our working hypothesis is that the status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age.

A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.

I understand that postmodern literature probably means people like DeLillo, The Fiction Collective, but I don’t get it that those writers are really influenced by postmodern theorists.

In the end, postmodern art is obscene not because it is offensive, but because it is boring.

I’m a contemporary playwright in a postmodern world.

The book has many different characteristics: some are extremely old-fashioned storytelling traits, but there are also a fair number of postmodern traits, and the self-consciousness is one.

I thought I’d write a massive postmodern novel about Richard the Lionheart and Robin Hood, but it turns out they couldn’t have met because the first mention of Robin Hood appears 60 years after Richard died.

I’ve purposely stayed away from reading much about postmodern theory, and most everything I have read just bored me to tears. I don’t think anybody‘s written about it, or very few have, with any verve.

Some years ago, I was invited to speak in Houston, Texas. They said I was a founder of ‘postmodern theatre‘. So I said to my office, ‘This is ridiculous for me to go and speak about postmodern theatre when I don’t know what it means, but… they’re paying me a lot of money, so I’ll go.’

Plastic surgery is a postmodern veil.

British culture is very cynical sometimes of overt displays of sentimentality, and I think that becomes almost a suspicion of emotion, or a suspicion of someone making a grand statement. It is always easier to be ironic, or ‘meta’, or coolly postmodern. But I think there is such a thing as authentic sentimentality.

I’m not a twentieth-century novelist, I’m not modern, and certainly not postmodern. I follow the form of the nineteenth-century novel; that was the century that produced the models of the form. I’m old-fashioned, a storyteller. I’m not an analyst, and I’m not an intellectual.