Postmodern Fiction Quotes & Sayings

Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups ... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. — Philip K. Dick

The overriding sense of Tokyo ... is that it is a city devoted to the new, sped up in a subtle but profound way: a postmodern science-fiction story set ten minutes in the future. — David Rakoff

Reality is shaped by the forces that destroy it. — D. Harlan Wilson

Quinn froze. There was nothing he could do now that would not be a mistake. Whatever choice he made
and he had to make a choice
would be arbitrary, a submission to chance. Uncertainty would haunt him to the end. At that moment, the two Stillmans started on their way again. The first turned right, the second turned left. Quin craved an amoeba's body, wanting to cut himself in half and run off in two directions at once. (Chapter 7) — Paul Auster

I grew up in the heat of '70s postmodern fiction and post-Godard films, and there was this idea that what mattered was the theory or meta in art. — Noah Baumbach

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. — Kathy Acker

I knew a man once who said, Death smiles at us all. All a man can do is smile back. — Russell Crowe

I think I always enjoyed the energy of a crowd, of being onstage. It started when I was even younger doing public speaking at school and just kept going from there. — Tom Green

And good luck to you, Miss Vale, wherever you may go. — Julie Anne Long

I was going to public school in the post-World War II, the grey doldrum years. But I was in this extraordinary environment of Manhattan, of Greenwich Village, of bohemian parents. — Anne Waldman

I like to blur the line between fact and fiction, but not to condescend to the reader by enmeshing her/him into some sort of a postmodern coop. — Aleksandar Hemon

Real life is generally very haphazard in its plotting, and I think a lot of people lament that, and turn to fiction to briefly experience, albeit vicariously, a more satisfying sort of reality. We want to see *sense*
not necessarily happy endings, but effectual actions and significant outcomes. (Postmodern fiction and metafiction, I gather, aim to call attention to the falsity of these things, which is like selling liquor that perversely makes you more sober). — Tim Powers

...Take the leap, they said. Live the billionaire's myth of immortality. And why not now, I thought. What else was there for Ross to acquire? Give the futurists their blood money and they will make it possible for you to live forever.
The pod would be his final shrine of entitlement. — Don DeLillo

Reagan's easy slippage between movies and reality is synechdochic for a political culture increasingly impervious to distinctions between fiction and history. — Michael Rogin

The legacy of the fairy story in my brain is that everything will work out. In fiction it would be very hard for me, as a writer, to give a bad ending to a good character, or give a good ending to a bad character. That's probably not a very postmodern thing to say. — Kate Atkinson

People came up: 'I thought you were 6 ft tall.' I'm average height - 5 ft 8 ins, skinny blonde. One guy says to me 'So, where's the fox from Mystic Pizza? — Julia Roberts

The subject of feminism cannot be purely a fiction, as some postmodern writers suggest, produced by the discourses of power. — Alison Assiter

Pictures are wasted unless the motive power which impelled you to action is strong and stirring. — Berenice Abbott

For where the instrument of intelligence is added to brute power and evil will, mankind is powerless in its own defense. — Dante Alighieri

It's just what you're stuck with, the lousy furniture you can't change. The educated me knows hell's nothing, a fiction I happened to inherit. The other me knows I'm going there. There must be a dozen mes these days, taking turns looking the other way."
"It's the postmodern solution," I said. "Controlled multiple personality disorder. Pick a fiction and allocate it an aspect of yourself. — Glen Duncan

Never judge a person if you don't know him. — Zlatan Ibrahimovic