About Quote by Will Self

Modernism: the books are as hard to understand as life itself.

— Mason Cooley

By Modernism, I mean the positive rejection of the past and the blind belief in the process of change; in novelty for its own…

— Dan Cruickshank

“The problem with modernism is that we actually believe, naively and arrogantly, that we can in some way hold any concept and grasp it…

— Tobin Wilson

Modernism is the protein of our cultural imagination.

— Robert Hughes

Modernism has a reputation for being a forbidding phenomenon: its visual arts disconcertingly non-representational, its literary efforts devoid of the consolations of plot and…

— Will Self

And yet what is Modernism? It is undefined.

— John Crowe Ransom

“Critical personal writing enables the author to penetrate mental falsities that imprison him or her in fearfulness, bitterness, and jealously and encompass the reverential…

— Kilroy J. Oldster

“What do I think was modernism’s subject, then? What was it about? No doubt you can guess my starting point. It was about steam—in…

— T. J. Clark

You see, the contemporary writer must write through his intimations of unease, while trying to elucidate them.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Modernism in other arts brought extreme difficulty. In poetry, the characteristic difficulty imported under the name of modernism was obscurity. But obscurity could just…

— James Fenton

The paradox of modernism is, writers make the decision to work with the continuous present, and to work with... stream of consciousness, as it's…

— Will Self

A lot of modernism does seem to come out of a fear of being thought an ordinary storyteller. So they tell it backwards and…

— Philip Pullman