Quotes About Irony

The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, 'then' what do we do?

Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is 'too much.

Although the photographer and the art thief were close friends, neither had ever taken the other's picture.

Art and irony would disintegrate the personality, kitsch makes it whole.

There's a side that I want to do just like really retarded arty films … like parody, pretentious art films that kind of are supposed to have some deep meaning.

Making fun of philosophy is really philosophising.

Can't wait to date a supermodel, can't wait to sue my Dad. Can't wait to wreck a Ferrari, on the way to rehab.

It's true that what is morbid is highly valued today, and so you may think that I am only joking or that I've devised just one more means of praising Art with the help of irony.

It is one of the ironies of biographical art that some details are more relevant than others, and many details have no relevance at all.

Laughter is the only tenable attitude in a universe which is a joke played on itself.

Get it? Foul. Not one of my subtler jokes, but it'll do.

When I read this, naturally my reaction as a concerned American was hahahahahahahahaha.

The easiest way to witness the stupidity and misplaced hopes of humanity is to watch, for twenty minutes, a human using a leaf blower. With this machine, the man was saying, I will murder all quiet. I will destroy the aural plane. And I will do so with a machine that performs a task far less efficiently than I could with a rake.

And everything that seemed possible at twenty-four, twenty-five, is now just such a joke, such a ridiculous fiction, every birthday an atrocity

One of the greatest ironies of the history of Christianity is that its leaders constantly gave in to the temptation of power—political power, military power, economic power, or moral and spiritual power—even though they continued to speak in the name of Jesus, who did not cling to his divine power but emptied himself and became as we are.

The world is upside down. Good is bad and bad is deified.

I'm always amazed that people take what I say seriously. I don't even take what I am seriously. (2012)

This is the point where the knowing, irony-infused author laughs along with his readers about his time among the aphorisms, how he was once so gullible and needy that he drank deeply of such weak and fruity Kool-Aid. That's some other book. Slogans saved my life. All of them--the dumb ones, the preachy ones, the imperatives, the cliches, the injunctives, the gooey, Godly ones, the shameless, witless ones.

Misty Sendaria, Silk said ironically. Sometimes I'm amazed that the entire kingdom doesn't rust shut.

There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact - in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for social equality itself - of vastly more help to conservatives and the US status quo than traditional SNOOT prescriptions ever were.

My own terror of appearing sentimental is so strong that I've decided to fight against it, some; but the terror is still there. . . . Do you identify with a distaste/fear about sentimentality? Do you agree that, past a certain line, such distaste can turn everything arch and sneering and too ironic? Or do you have your own set of abstract questions to drive yourself nuts with?

This American penchant for absolution via irony is foreign to them.

Show me somebody who really knows what irony means and I'll show you a bullshit artist.

Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving. There's some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who's come to love his cage.