Anton Chekhov
Playwright, Short Story Writer
"Life is difficult for those who have the daring to first set out on an unknown road. The avant-garde always has a bad time of it."
Avant Garde quotes
Avant Garde
70 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Nicolas Cage
Actor, Producer
"I like fantasy. I like horror, science fiction because I can get avant-garde with those performances in those movies."
John Lennon
Musician, Activist
"Avant-garde is French for bullshit"
Simone de Beauvoir
Philosopher, Writer
"It's important that you think of your relationship with the world and the way you can express that world and that you not be stopped if it scandalizes or embarrasses; but you must not look for scandal or for the avant-garde as a thing in itself."
Simone de Beauvoir
Philosopher, Writer
"I never thought of myself as being in the avant-garde. I said what I had to say, as I was able to say it."
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Avant Garde quotes (page 1 of 4)
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"What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants."
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"I expect the hip-hop audience to be avant garde. I want them to be where I'm at or beyond where I'm at."
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"There is a place for visionaries and the avant-garde in this world, but not at 9 o'clock on a network."
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"I am neither in the past, nor avant-garde. My style follows life."
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"Picasso never thought of himself as avant-garde. I just find it a bad way to think of yourself."
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"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."
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"You can't define the future. And in my opinion, you can't define the avant-garde."
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"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."
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"I got into trad jazz, then modern jazz, then avant-garde jazz, between the ages of 16 to 18."
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"I love art, I love music. I can listen to Stockhausen and a very experimental, avant-garde approach, and I can listen to Beethoven and have a more classical, traditional approach. Why not be able to do that with film performance?"
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