Postmodern Literature Quotes

Don DeLillo's 'White Noise,' which I read when I was 19. It showed me that a book can be funny as hell and deadly serious.

You know, I don't want to be offensive. But 'Infinite Jest' [regarded by many as Wallace's masterpiece] is just awful. It seems ridiculous to have to say it. He can't think, he can't write. There's no discernible talent.

The best novelist of my generation is an Italian living in Paris, still working and improving - Italo Calvino.

Guerrilla ontology The basic technique of all my books . Ontology is the study of being; the guerrilla approach is to so mix the elements of each book that the reader must decide on each page 'How much of this is real and how much is a put-on?

Notable American Women is a weird nougat of a book that suggests Coetzee, Kafka, Beckett, Barthelme, O'Brien, Orwell, Paley, Borges-and none of them exactly. Finally you just have to chew it for its own private juice.

I believe the structure of 'House of Leaves' is far more difficult to explain than it is to read. And while I'd like to lay claim to some extraordinary act of originality, truth is I'm only taking advantage of capabilities inherent in everyone.

Modern literature seduces with insults, riddles, and inside stories.

I've just finished reading Reality Hunger and I'm lit up by it-astonished, intoxicated, ecstatic, overwhelmed. . . . It really is an urgent book: a piece of art-making itself, a sublime, exciting, outrageous, visionary volume.

I'm ashamed and embarrassed to say that I've read very little of David Foster Wallace's work. It's a huge gap in my education, one of many.

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.

I never really liked "cool" books. I plowed through as much Borges and Joyce as possible, read the first half of V. and spent whole Bar Mitzvah checks on Beat poetry.

I am in that everything [ David Foster Wallace] writes is pretty much the best stuff I've read, so that makes me a fan I guess.

I spent four years doing a doctorate in postmodern American literature. I can recognize it when I see it.

I'm grateful for the likes of Kundera, Murnane, Markson, Berger, and, in his recent work, Coetzee. But no matter how celebrated they are, critics still consider them askance. Elizabeth Costello, for example, is a great novel, but it got quite a critical panning when it was published. The complaint was that it was simply a book of speeches, without the machinery of conventional fiction. Markson's books are compilations of facts and alleged facts, very artfully.

There's no such thing as the contemporary novel. Before I seem the complete reactionary, let me add that I've happily joined in many discussions about 'the contemporary novel' where what that usually, unproblematically means is novels that have appeared recently or may appear soon.

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.

Shelley Jackson's 'Half Life' is the textual equivalent of an installation, a multivocal, polymorphous, dialogic, dystopian satire wrapped around a murder mystery wrapped around a bildungsroman.

I usually see the word "metafiction" applied to works that draw attention to their own devices, their own artificiality, in order to mock novelistic convention and show the impossibility of capturing a reality external to the text or whatever.

The novel is dead. Long live the antinovel, built from scraps.

Until I was 16, I read nothing but science fiction. I loved William Gibson and I still do. But my favourite book when I was growing up, for a long time, was 'Snow Crash' by Neal Stephenson, which I must have read about a dozen times when I was a teenager.

For whatever reason, when it came out in 1995, 'Infinite Jest' became a cultural event. It was the massive book that was 'cool' for all the Gen Xers to read.

Steve Coogan picks up enough to lecture an interviewer: This is a postmodern novel before there was any modernism to be post about. Later it's claimed that Tristram Shandy was No. 8 on the Observer's list of the greatest novels, which cheers everyone until they discover the list was chronological.

Naked Lunch was from about a thousand pages of material. A lot of it overflowed, then, into the cut-up trilogy including Nova Express.

The Anglo-American tradition is much more linear than the European tradition. If you think about writers like Borges, Calvino, Perec or Marquez, they're not bound in the same sort of way. They don't come out of the classic 19th-century novel, which is where all the problems start. 19th-century novels are fabulous and we should all read them, but we shouldn't write them.

Thomas Pynchon surely inaugurated or crystallized a new genre in 1963 when he published 'V.' The seriocomic mystery or thriller with one foot set in the present and one in various historical eras received its postmodern baptism from Pynchon.