Modernist Quotes

#1. In Jack Nasar's research on American's taste in homes, only one group preferred the modernist house: architects.

Winifred Gallagher

#2. Peter Kropotkin described Anarchism as the extreme left wing of socialism - a view with which I completely agree. One of my deepest concerns today is that the libertarian socialist core will be eroded by fashionable, post- modernist, spiritualist, mystic individualism.

Murray Bookchin

#3. I wouldn't call my work Modernist. I would rust if I try to think about labels. I'd feel like the Tin Man in 'The Wizard of Oz.'

Ali Smith

#4. For Guy Davenport--whom he told me John Barth once called the last modernist--modernism is 'a renaissance of the archaic'.

Lance Olsen

#5. The French Revolution is the ultimate modernist statement. Destroy everything. Don't build on the past. There is no past.

John Corigliano

#6. Downtown Toronto is a very good place to talk about the neutrality of modernist architecture. I'm sure this kind of box-building was interesting in the Twenties, Thirties and Forties, but I think it's absolutely ridiculous to build like this in 2013.

Stefan Sagmeister

#7. It was a very stupid mistake to think you could deal with heresy by burning heretics. It's the very same mistake that modernist Catholics are making today in reverse. They think you can love heretics by loving heresies.

Peter Kreeft

#8. The pure modernist is merely a snob; he cannot bear to be a month behind the fashion.

G.K. Chesterton

#9. I see myself as a true modernist. Even when I do a traditional gown, I give it a modern twist. I go to the past for research. I need to know what came before so I can break the rules.

Vera Wang

#10. I was under the influence of the early modern masters, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck and Hemingway, especially, when I was a kid. I reacted against writers like Barth and John Hawkes. I did not care for the post-modernist stuff; my allegiance was to realism.

Robert Stone

#11. Modernist discourse [ ... ] incorporates semantic devices - such as the labeling of theism as 'religion' and naturalism as 'science' - that work to prevent a dangerous debate over fundamental assumptions from breaking out in the open.

Phillip E. Johnson

#12. I'm truly an outsider in the poetry world. When I started writing, I was trying to move my poems away from modernist lines.

Richard Grossman

#13. The modernist writers found despair inspirational.

Mason Cooley

#14. Fitzgerald was a modernist.

Baz Luhrmann

#15. Part of the triumph of modernist poetry is, indeed, to have demonstrated the great extent to which verse can do without explicit meaning and yet not sacrifice anything essential to its effect as art. Here, as before, successful art can be depended upon to explain itself.

Clement Greenberg

#16. To the modernist, "myth," like religion, merely signifies a comfortable and entrenched lie. For the postmodernist, myth simply represents one story, one narrative among many; it is purely subjective, certainly signifying nothing of transcendent or any other kind of importance.

Bradley J. Birzer

#17. Modernist architecture and town planning is inimical to human beings ... based on the Darwinian concept that evolution is open ended, that there must always be something new and better.

Leon Krier

#18. When we first did 'Modernist Cuisine,' I think most people in cookbook publishing would have said, 'This is insane.'

Nathan Myhrvold

#19. Most of our cities built since the war are bland. They're modernist, they're cold, and now architects want to go back to that.

Frank Gehry

#20. By 1970, the first stirrings of the revolt against Modernist orthodoxy in architecture had been felt, although it would be several years more until Postmodernism was widely accepted and made classical motifs permissible in high-style building design for the first time in decades.

Martin Filler

#21. I think the adjective post-modernist really means mannerist. Books about books is fun but frivolous.

Angela Carter

#22. Following the Post Modernist route, we may indeed never arrive at meaning, but not because meaning is not there ... only because we are lost in endless linguistic games that are entirely beside the point.

Massimo Pigliucci

#23. Without this spirit, Modernist architecture cannot fully exist. Since there is often a mismatch between the logic and the spirit of Modernism, I use architecture to reconcile the two.

Tadao Ando

#24. In his own way the modernist becomes as irrelevant as the fundamentalist. The fundamentalist has something to say to his world, but he has lost the ability to say it. The modernist knows how to speak to his age, but he has nothing to say.

William E. Hordern

#25. Those of us born into vitalist and expressionist cultures must hope that governments will draw back from shutting down the modernist project of exploring, experimenting, and imagining - of voyaging into the unknown - that has been essential for rewarding lives.

Edmund Phelps

#26. As a pure source of reference, 'Modernist Cuisine' is incredibly helpful. It's like a modern-day encyclopedia, except for a single subject. It's not always the answer, but it's always a starting point. I feel honored to have been able to contribute to it.

Wylie Dufresne

#27. I think our sensibility is not modernist anymore, that is, sensibility of people who are interested in art and literature.

Louis Menand

#28. The whole Modernist lie is that art is about the artist.

Thomas Kinkade

#29. The modernist preference for high seriousness is replaced by the postmodernist preference for playfulness.

Dharanidhar Sahu

#30. In the modernist era the division between art and the world was close to absolute, or put another way, art was a world of its own.

Karl Ove Knausgard

#31. In the attacks on the old ways of doing things on word in particular came into currency. That word was "kitsch." Once introduced, the word stuck. Whatever you do, it musn't be kitsch. This became the first precept of the modernist artist in every medium.

Roger Scruton

#32. 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.

Stanley Hauerwas

#33. Today we take New England clam chowder as something traditional that makes our roots as American cooking very solid, with a lot of foundation. But the first person who decided to mix potatoes and clams and bacon and cream, in his own way 100 to 200 years ago, was a modernist.

Jose Andres

#34. I'm often called an old-fashioned modernist. But the modernists had the absurd idea that architecture could heal the world. That's impossible. And today nobody expects architects to have these grand visions any more.

Thom Mayne

#35. There are no chords in modernist architecture, only lines - lines that may come to an end, but that achieve no closure

Roger Scruton

#36. In the traditional modernist planning that created the suburbs, you put residential buildings in suburban neighborhoods, office spaces into brain parks and retail in shopping malls. But you fail to exploit the possibility of symbiosis or synthesis that way.

Bjarke Ingels

#37. In one sense, (Duchamp's) "The Large Glass" is a glimpse into Hell; a peculiarly modernist Hell of repetition and loneliness.

Robert Hughes

#38. Where the Old Masters created an illusion of space into which one could imagine walking, the illusion created by a Modernist is one into which one can look, can travel through, only with the eye.

Clement Greenberg

#39. Modernist buildings exclude dialogue, and the void that they create around themselves is not a public space but a desertification

Roger Scruton

#40. Surface is a modernist concept. What surface does is to encourage one to see the painting as object rather than as a window on the world.

Kay WalkingStick

#41. To human beings it won't look or feel like a war, it'll be more like ... one of those modernist paintings you lot do, if it melted. Inside all your brains. Forever.

Paul Cornell

#42. As Adam Gopnik remarked in The New Yorker, "Post-modernist art is, above all, post-audience art." In

David Bayles

#43. Cooking is an art, but all art requires knowing something about the techniques and materials. Using modernist techniques, you get more control, and that allows you to be more artistic, not less!

Nathan Myhrvold

#44. Palestinian society is filled with poetry, but not experimental poetry. The Palestinian poetry that people know is not the modernist experimentations, it's certain kinds of poetry that lends itself to recitation and song and things like that.

Elliott Colla

#45. It's just about asking why. We as cooks historically have been very, very technically proficient but not technically informed as to why we do what we do. Modernist cuisine is about that knowledge.

Wylie Dufresne

#46. Cover each with plastic wrap (you see, I hope, that I am no mere antiquarian, insisting on barefoot walks through unimproved sculleries. I am as grateful as anyone for real progress as any modernist. More so, perhaps. Anything that preserves freshness for the pot is on the side of the angels.

Robert Farrar Capon

#47. Modernist fiction is tied to problems of writers. Self-glorifying. Existential struggle. This has not been a big part of genre writing.

Paul Park

#48. An exciting and yet highly lucid account of the formation and significance of Karl Kraus's modernist journalism, an activity that Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem regarded as the most Jewish writing in the German language. The Anti-Journalist is the best book I have seen on this engaging topic.

Istvan Deak

#49. I want an ending that's satisfying. I'm more of a classical writer than a modernist one in that I want the ending to be coherent and feel like an ending. I don't like when it just seems to putter out. I mean, life is chaotic enough.

Jeffrey Eugenides

#50. Hollywood Regency is a label some people put on me, but I consider myself a modernist in that I always try to make the work feel fresh.

Kelly Wearstler

#51. God says He made man out of the dust of the ground; the modernist tells us this is false - man evolved from lower life forms.

Anonymous

#52. Of course, that's one of the dreams of modernist literature, whether realist or fantastic: that the more stories we tell each other about such tragedies, the fewer of them there will be. We're still waiting for the results.

Charles Finch

#53. I question: do we really understand the differences between modernist and postmodernist?

Kathy Acker

#54. It is incomprehensible to me that any thinker can calmly call himself a modernist; he might as well call himself a Thursdayite.

G.K. Chesterton

#55. I'm an avowed modernist. I'm for the new thing. I came to the conclusion many years ago that rock music is essentially a conservative form.

Rob Chapman

#56. .'All is suffering' is a bad modernist translation. What the Buddha really said is: It's all a mixed bag. Shit is complicated. Everything's fucked up. Everything's gorgeous.

Robin Coste Lewis

#57. Many people think of me as a modernist, as a radical in music, you know, someone who's always sort of at the avant-garde of musics, but I'm also quite a traditionalist.

Gunther Schuller

#58. Who'd want to be a modernist writer in the English-speaking world?

Will Self

#59. If modernist naturalism were true, there would be no objective truth outside of science. In that case right and wrong would be a matter of cultural preference, or political power, and the power already available to modernists ideologies would be overwhelming.

Phillip E. Johnson

#60. [Burke] emphasized that the new forms of politics, which hope to organize society around the rational pursuit of liberty, equality, fraternity, or their modernist equivalents, are actually forms of militant irrationality.

Roger Scruton

#61. The two most potent post-war orthodoxies
socialist politics and modernist art
have at least one feature in common: they are bothforms of snobbery, the anti-bourgeois snobbery of people convinced of their right to dictate to the common man in the name of the common man.

Roger Scruton

#62. Before World War II, Modernist architects sometimes had to resort to custom fabrication or outright fakery to achieve the machine imagery advocated by the Bauhaus after its initial, Expressionist, phase. Stucco masqueraded as reinforced concrete; rivets were used for decoration.

Martin Filler

#63. They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain anything!

Joseph Conrad

#64. One may as well begin with Helen's letters to her sister.

E. M. Forster

#65. You remember I had a strong inclination all my life to be a painter. Under different circumstances I would rather have been a painter than to bother with these god-damn words. I never actually thought of myself as a poet but I knew I had to be an artist in some way.

William Carlos Williams