A Quote by Will Self

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 character - even its films, it's argued, fall well short of that true desideratum: entertainment.

Will Self

Quote Author

Will Self
English - Author
Born: September 26, 1961

Reputation is seeming; character is being. Reputation is manufactured; character is grown. Reputation is your photograph; There is a vast difference between character and reputation. Reputation is what men think we are; character is what God knows us to be. Reputation is seeming; character is being. Reputation is the breath of men; character is the inbreathing of the eternal God. One may for a time have a good reputation and a bad character, or the reverse ; but not for long.

Robert Stuart MacArthur

The moment in the account of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis is when they realize they're naked and try and cover themselves with fig leaves. That seemed to me a perfect allegory of what happened in the 20th century with regard to literary modernism. Literary modernism grew out of a sense that, “Oh my god! I'm telling a story! Oh, that can't be the case, because I'm a clever person. I'm a literary person! What am I going to do to distinguish myself?...a lot of modernism does seem to come out of a fear of being thought an ordinary storyteller.

Philip Pullman

I didn't start publishing literary texts until I had left Iraq. At the Academy [of Cinematic Arts] I was busy with short films.

Hassan Blasim

Some of the martial arts films, the motivation is about martial arts. That's where it's coming from. It is a visual, commercial film, to showcase the next stunt, the biggest thing. And character development becomes a side thing.

Michelle Yeoh

The kind of painting which I find exciting is not necessarily representational or non-representational, but it is musical and architectural... Whether this visual relationship is slightly more or slightly less abstract is, for me, beside the point.

Ben Nicholson

After modernism, things changed. Indeed, modernism sometimes seems to me like an equivalent of the Fall. Remember, the first thing Adam and Eve did when they ate the fruit was to discover that they had no clothes on. They were embarrassed. Embarrassment was the first consequence of the Fall. And embarrassment was the first literary consequence of this modernist discovery of the surface. "Am I telling a story? Oh my God, this is terrible. I must stop telling a story and focus on the minute gradations of consciousness as they filter through somebody's.

Philip Pullman

The literary artist lends verbal depth to the visual. The visual artist provides visible articulation for the literary.

Aberjhani

By denying people's sense of visual beauty in painting and sculpture , melody in music , meter and rhyme in poetry , plot and narrative and character in fiction , the elite arts wrote off the vast majority of their audience . They purposely excluded people who approach art in part for pleasure and edification in favour of social one-upmanship and an ever-narrowing, in-crowd elite.

Steven Pinker

I'm pulling out different aspects of my personality in writing each character and, if I'm doing my job well, I'm being true to the situation and true to the character.

Bill Watterson

But short films are not inferior, just different. I think the short gives a freedom to film-makers. What's appealing is that you don't have as much responsibility for storytelling and plot. They can be more like a portrait, or a poem.

Jane Campion

Literary readings aren't going to shake their reputation as the added-fibre of our entertainment diet until the people who organize and participate in them snap out of this mentality.

Lynn Coady

Criticism even should not be without its charms. When quite devoid of all amenities, it is no longer literary.

Joseph Joubert

In the visual arts, for example, the semiological approach to graphics provides a rigorous analysis of the visual means used by the artist. It defines the basic properties and laws governing the arts and suggests objective criteria for art criticism.

Jacques Bertin

The only failure is the failure to learn from conscious and deliberate efforts to make things better, even if those attempts fall short of the mark.

Stewart D. Friedman

With the Ford Foundation grant all of a sudden instead of being an artist that had made a couple of short films, I became a filmmaker who dabbled in the arts.