Dave Eggers Quotes

The Postmodernists' tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose.

There's this expression called postmodernism, which is kind of silly, and destroys a perfectly good word called modern, which now no longer means anything.

It's clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do.

Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.

I think the avant-garde often hides itself in the highly incomprehensible because they are frustrated that the real world is so boring.

One of our great thematic traditions in Bad Religion has been to question human nature.

The knife of historical relativism... which has cut to pieces all metaphysics and religion must also bring about healing.

If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.

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.

Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.

I think the pattern of my essays is, A funny thing happened to me on my way through Finnegans Wake.

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

There are few circumstances which so strongly distinguish the philosopher, as the calmness with which he can reply to criticisms he may think undeservedly severe.

I used to teach at Yale, which was at one time a center of postmodernist literary theory. Derrida was there. Paul de Man was there.

And yet what is Modernism? It is undefined.

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.'

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.

Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.

I liked Sartre's views but not his writing.

Real philosophy is like trying to read an alarm system installation manual in Korean.

I tried to take seriously the idea that if you tortured language you might arrive at some new truth. Later it became clear to me that I was retreading ground by fighting the literary battles of the 1950s and 1960s, and that I was actually a bit bored by some of the books I professed to love.

Oh see, first off you gotta realize - everything for me is a reconstruction or deconstruction. I would actually say deconstruction. Mission: Impossible would be the exception. That would be a reconstruction- deconstruction.

There is something delicious in finding fault with something.

[Thomas Jefferson is:] ... a slur upon the moral government of the world.

I was reading a lot of Jacques Derrida at the time, writing 'Beth.' He actually talked about zombies.