Jonathan Raban Quotes

I was thinking about the generation before us, like John Barth and all of those pomo dudes who had that idea of, instead of hiding the structure and making it look organic and natural, we're going to put the structure on the outside. But most of the time, at least for me, all I could attend to [in Swing Time] was that act of structural self-consciousness.

What seems distinctively modern as a unit of thought, of art, of discourse is the fragment; and the quotation is one kind of fragment.

My book is traditional. It runs counter to the post-modern spirit.

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.

The Romantics were whipping boys of the New Criticism, but they appealed to me anyway. I was recalcitrant. It was clear to me that they had thought innovatively.

What interests me, and has always interested me, has been modernism.

My favourite authors are Milan Kundera and Jeanette Winterson.

Jacques Derrida is a very important thinker and philosopher who has made serious contributions to both philosophy and literary criticism. Roland Barthes is the one I feel most affinity for, and Michel Foucault, well, his writing influenced my novel, 'Middlesex.'

Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of revolutionary avant-gardism.

As for critical writing about modernism, its moments of lucidity are but fulgurations illuminating the dark and incomprehensible landscape of its subject's unabashed difficulty.

I liked early Amis a lot, but I stopped reading him some time ago. I admire Hitchens on literary topics - I think he is very astute. McEwan, I read a bit. But I suppose it's more the ideological phenomenon that they represent together that interests me.

The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear - and even, in certain respects, would be - the most modern of critical movements.

I met Donald Barthelme when I was 30, and it's fair to say that before that moment, I was pre-modern, and after I met him, I was nudged rather forcefully towards this other end of the spectrum.

I'm not one of those James Joyce intellectuals who can stand back and look at the whole edifice... It was a slow process for me to just crawl out of it, like a snake leaving his skin behind.

I love Toni Morrison and Jeanette Winterson. 'The Passion' is my favourite book.

I wanted to avoid all that literary stuff. I didn't want the self pity of 'The Portrait,' all the moaning and the whingeing. I'm not knocking Joyce: we all owe him a debt. He's the one who made so much possible.

I like people like Andre Malraux, Edmund Wilson, Willa Cather, Robert Graves, Erik Erikson, and Francis Steegmuller.

I'd studied English literature at university, but I was also far more enamored with Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and James Joyce. That was my passion.

I have many influences and poets whose work I love. My personal canon includes Blake, Keats, Dickinson, Baudelaire, Stevens, Duncan and Barbara Guest - and many living poets as well.

what exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety?

Some of us, I think, us small, pompous arty ones probably read too much George Steiner and kind of got the idea that we were entering to this kind of post-culture age and that we'd better do something postmodernist - quickly, before somebody else did.

When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain, Before high-piled books, in charactery, Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain; When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And think that I may never live to trace Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance; And when I feel, fair creature of an hour, That I shall never look upon thee more, Never have relish in the faery power Of unreflecting love;--then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

No one is more romantic than a cynic. I do think that you don't become cynical or 'unsentimental' unless there's a core of romanticism or sentiment that's had a few chips nicked into it.

I think that denim is a sexy piece. If I would invest in anything in my closet it would be denim because you can wear it day to night and now it's even acceptable to wear to a business meeting.

Cultivate your Futurism. I'll cultivate my Döblinism.