"Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving. ... The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years."

Art, Irony, Culture, Writing

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"Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving. ... The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years."

Exlpore more Art quotes

"Always seek beauty to create a beautiful life."

Debasish Mridha, American Author

Art, Beauty, Creation, Inspiration, Aesthetic

"For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle."

Ernest Hemingway, American Novelist

Art, Poetry, Humor, Accuracy, Creativity

"I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across-not to just depict life-or criticize it-but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can't believe in it. Things aren't that way."

Ernest Hemingway, American Novelist

Art, Storytelling, Life, Reality, Truth

"Make movies my friend " make nice, inspiring and bold movies that will penetrate the darkest corners of the human mind and illuminate the soul."

Abhijit Naskar, Indian Author

Art, Inspirational, Power, Truth, Wisdom

"My poems are only bits of scratchingon the floor of acage."

Charles Bukowski, American Author

Art, Poetry, Expression, Creativity, Life

"A short story is the ultimate close-up magic trick -- a couple of thousand words to take you around the universe or break your heart."

Neil Gaiman, British Author

Art, Storytelling, Magic, Emotion, Heart

"For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, American Poet

Art, Poetry, Time, Music, Writing

"Music gives life to the soul."

Lailah Gifty Akita, Ghanaian Author

Art, Music, Life, Soul, Energy

"Some writers closet themselves - I write wherever I am because that's where life is happening ..."

John Geddes, Canadian Author

Art, Writing, Life, Presence, Creativity

"Music gives strength to the soul."

Lailah Gifty Akita, Ghanaian Author

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Explore more quotes by David Foster Wallace

"It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art."

Art, Exercise, Trying

"For these cultures, getting rid of the pain without addressing the deeper cause would be like shutting off a fire alarm while the fire's still going."

Cause, Fire, Pain

"One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism."

Philosophy, Artist

"I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader."

Desire, Writers

"Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se."

Society, End, Pleasure, Value

"The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates."

Society, Flaws, Irony

"The most dangerous thing about an academic education is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract thinking instead of simply paying attention to what's going on in front of me."

Awareness, Education, Thinking, Attention

"She was terrified of everything, and terrified to show it."

Emotion, Fear, Sensitivity, Anxiety

"But someone sometime let you forget how to choose, and what. Someone let your peoples forget it was the only thing of importance, choosing. . . How to choose any but a child's greedy choices if there is no loving-filled father to guide, inform, teach the person how to choose? How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?"

Wisdom, Choice, Freedom, Morality, Growth

"What teachers and the administration in that era never seemed to see was that the mental work of what they called daydreaming often required more effort and concentration than it would have taken simply to listen in class. Laziness is not the issue. It is just not the work dictated by the administration."

Creativity, Mind, Effort, Work