A Quote by Lewis H. Lapham

Usually when I drank too much, I could guess why I did so, the objective being to murder a state of consciousness that I didn't have the courage to sustain--a fear of heights, which sometimes during the carnival of the 1960s accompanied my attempts to transform the bourgeois journalist into an avant-garde novelist. The stepped-up ambition was a commonplace among the would-be William Faulkners of my generation; nearly always it resulted in commercial failure and literary embarrassment.

Lewis H. Lapham

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Always Ambition Among Attempts Avant-Garde Being Bourgeois Carnival Commercial Commonplace Consciousness Could Courage Did Drank Embarrassment Failure Fear Generation Guess Heights Journalist Literary Much Murder My Generation Nearly Novelist Objective Sometimes State Stepped Sustain Too Too Much Transform Up Which Why William Would Would-Be

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Lewis H. Lapham
American - Editor
Born: January 8, 1935

More than one branch of the avant-garde, claiming to break with the bourgeois vision and mode of production, remains tied to it in spite of its denials and ex-communications. We are far from having overcome bourgeois thought or practices, despite the socialist "intermission" between the Russian revolution and the collapse of the Berlin wall. The avant-garde has lost its radical nature. On the other hand, "bourgeois theatre" is sometimes subtle enough to flirt with the avant-garde or to make "intelligent boulevard theatre.

Patrice Pavis

The avant-garde has always existed throughout the history of mankind. The good things from the avant-garde last and eventually, after many years, become tradition and people forget they were ever part of the avant-garde. The kitchen is a living discipline, always evolving, and there will always be cutting edge things that over the years, ends up being part of tradition.

Ferran Adria

If you try consciously to be avant-garde, it's a little dangerous, like the present state of modern painting, where dealers try to be avant-garde, and under this pretext, painters take some old scraps and call it avant-garde.

Simone de Beauvoir

The majority of people probably think that Damien Hirst is avant-garde. Look at the amount of people who say 'What is this rubbish? Who is running our galleries? Why are they spending all this money on the avant-garde?' That doesn't make it avant-garde to me.

Vic Reeves

I am, it seems, an avant-garde dramatist. It would even seem obvious since I am present here at discussions on the avant-garde theatre. It is all entirely official. But what does the term avant-garde mean?

Eugene Ionesco

We will have to create an avant-garde.... We could have a Union for the enlarged Europe, and a Federation for the avant-garde.

Jacques Delors

It's so easy to be mistaken about the future. Sometimes there are avant-gardes which believe themselves to be the avant-garde and which later find themselves to be absolutely dated.

Simone de Beauvoir

My writing is called exotic or avant-garde because I write about rural places. Has it really come to this, that if you write about the country you are avant-garde? How did this happen? Modern agriculture and spaces are still so relevant.

Sarah Hall

The avant-garde understands itself as invading unknown territory, exposing itself to the dangers of sudden, shocking encounters, conquering an as yet unoccupied future ... The avant-garde must find a direction in a landscape into which no one seems to have yet ventured.

Jurgen Habermas

Melody was banned from music by the composers of the avant-garde. I was unique among them in always using and writing melody and so I think this is why I've shared my music, why they can have also pleasure, not only an interesting structure.

Krzysztof Penderecki

I wanted to be a poet and/or an artist, but I was very lazy (frightened of failure, I guess) and drank too much.

Peter Blegvad

The only place Avant Garde looks good is in the words Avant Garde.

Ed Benguiat

Avant-garde theatre, with its distrust of the individual (that bourgeois invention), tends to go beyond [character] and the psychological approach in search of a syntax of types and characters which are "deconstructed and post-individual.

Patrice Pavis

It is not necessary to be too avant-garde, because you risk not being understood.

Domenico Dolce

An avant-garde man is like an enemy inside a city he is bent on destroying, against which he rebels; for like any system of government, an established form of expression is also a form of oppression. The avant-garde man is the opponent of an existing system.

Eugene Ionesco

Innovation, being avant garde, is always polemic.

Ferran Adria

A Quote by Lewis H. Lapham

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