Most dystopian, classic and contemporary, paints a future world that puts a twist on present society - a future world that could plausibly happen. — Lauren DeStefano
Set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism. — Neil Gaiman
Contemporary literature in the West has shown some signs of ethical change. — Lafcadio Hearn
The secret of successful fiction is a continual slight novelty. — Edmund Gosse
Fiction helps me to reconnect with the true, deep weirdness inherent in everyday reality, in our dealings with one another, in just being alive. — Karen Russell
Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century. — J. G. Ballard
Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures. — Jessamyn West
Fiction is the truth inside the lie. — Stephen King
Fiction has a unique role in conveying Truth. In fact, only fiction that is Truth with a capital T is worthwhile. — Jerry B. Jenkins
Fact is often stranger than fiction because most writers of fiction try to make their stories plausible. — Richard Posner
The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. — Jose Saramago
There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative. — E. L. Doctorow
The problem with fiction, it has to be plausible. That's not true with non-fiction. — Tom Wolfe
Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over. — Neil Gaiman
Contemporary Literature Quotes
What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real. — George Bernard Shaw
The most prevalent poetic representation of contemporary experience is the mimesis of disorientation by non sequitor. — Tony Hoagland
The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it. — Gertrude Stein
Fiction is the truth inside the lie.
Even though what I enjoy most is literature, I would not want to live only in a world of fiction, cut off from the rest of life. No - I want to always have a foot in the street, to be inmersed in the activities of my contemporaries, in the times, in the place where I live. — Mario Vargas Llosa
I like contemporary American literature and I like biographies and I like jazz and I like baseball and I like writers who write about the human condition and sci-fi is just something that I happened into. — Jonathan Frakes
Maya Angelou, the famous African American poet, historian, and civil rights activist who is hailed be many as one of the great voices of contemporary literature, believes a struggle only makes a person stronger. — Michael N. Castle
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing... My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. — Arthur Conan Doyle
Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society . . . loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Most of the really good literature I've read in my life was political, meaning it was important - about something going on in the history of the world - or contemporary. — Toni Morrison
I read recently that the problem with stereotypes isn't that they are inaccurate, but that they're incomplete. And this captures perfectly what I think about contemporary African literature. The problem isn't that it's inaccurate, it's that it's incomplete. — Taiye Selasi
Modern Novel Quotes
Well, when I am fifty-three or so I would like to write a novel as good as Persuasion but with a modern setting, of course. For the next thirty years or so I shall be collecting material for it. If anyone asks me what I work at, I shall say, 'Collecting material'. No one can object to that. — Stella Gibbons
The master of ceremonies asked people to say what they thought the function of the novel might be in modern society, and one critic said, “To provide touches of color in rooms with all-white walls.” Another one said, “To describe blow-jobs artistically. — Kurt Vonnegut
Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end. — Philip Larkin
The universe wrote fiction is us. Its called Fear.
After closely examining my conscience, I venture to state that in my historical novels I intended the content to be just as modern and up-to-date as in the contemporary ones. — Lion Feuchtwanger
The wildest ride in modern crime novel exoticum. A novel so steeped in milieu that it feels as if you've blasted to mars in the grip of a demon who won't let you go. Read this book, savor the language-it's the last-and the most compelling word in thrillers. — James Ellroy
The historical novel gives us perspective on our modern lives and helps us connect with the story, which we are continuing ourselves. — Mary Pope Osborne
There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born. — Renata Adler
Joaquin Jackson's frank and colorful account of his long career as a modern-day Texas Ranger thrills like an action novel, yet the stories are true, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, but always gripping. I could hardly put the book down. . . .The writing is superb. — Elmer Kelton
In modern novels I try to not let myself get away and to be here, and that's why I write about my life and myself. But even when I do that there's an element of disappearing to a place that's not me. It's "the selflessness of writing". It seldom happens, but when it does it's worth quite a lot. — Karl Ove Knausgard
I also read modern novels - I have just had to read 60 as I am one of the judges for the Orange Fiction Prize. — Kate Adie
Fiction Novels Quotes
My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres; it’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky. — Alan Moore
I'm working on a nonfiction book on Nepal and a novel about diasporas. — Louise Brown
Oh, I’m nerdy about science fiction and fantasy and graphic novels and reading, and I’m nerdy about board games. My favorite board game is a board game I’m working on right now. It’s a game of Napoleonic era naval warfare, and it’s going to be fun. — Billy Campbell
Expand the definition of 'reading' to include non-fiction, humor, graphic novels, magazines, action adventure, and, yes, even websites. It's the pleasure of reading that counts; the focus will naturally broaden. A boy won't read shark books forever. — Jon Scieszka
It is perfectly okay to write garbage – as long as you edit brilliantly. — C. J. Cherryh
Babylon 5 is probably the biggest, most ambitious television science fiction series ever made. It's one big novel told over five years with 110 different stories told within it. — Bill Mumy
My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying. — Anton Chekhov
The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with. — William Faulkner
We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something. — Orson Scott Card
If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor. — Edgar Rice Burroughs
Contemporary Life Quotes
Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. — William Faulkner
To understand what I am saying, you have to believe that dance is something other than technique. We forget where the movements come from. They are born from life. When you create a new work, the point of departure must be contemporary life -- not existing forms of dance. — Pina Bausch
One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to that. — Joseph Campbell
I don't see boundaries between styles, such as modern or contemporary. I've collected each piece from a different experience or period of my life. — Carlos Miele
Body and soul, Black America reveals the extreme questions of contemporary life, questions of freedom and identity: How can I be who I am? — June Jordan
It's one of the great tragedies of our contemporary life in America, that families fall apart. Almost everybody has that in common. — Sam Shepard
Jesus is not a memory. He is an actual, contemporary, reachable Person. He is the living Christ, who has the power to enter into people's lives and change and lift them up. — Norman Vincent Peale
The most difficult problems are naturally not involved in the search for forms for contemporary life. It is a question of working our way to forms behind which real human values lie. — Alvar Aalto
We are not disillusioned because we have no illusions... What we have and what is our strength, is our joy in life... in all its amoral aspects. That is also the basis of our contemporary art. — Asger Jorn
Readers need to see themselves between the lines of the story. — Karen Kingsbury
Reading Fiction Quotes
Beyond that, I seem to be compelled to write science fiction, rather than fantasy or mysteries or some other genre more likely to climb onto bestseller lists even though I enjoy reading a wide variety of literature, both fiction and nonfiction. — Joan D. Vinge
All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of fiction. — Steve Almond
Simply put, Redeeming Love is the most powerful work of fiction you will ever read. — Liz Curtis Higgs
As a child, I read science fiction, but from the very beginnings of my reading for pleasure, I read a lot of non-fictional history, particularly historical biography. — Norman Spinrad
I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me. — Jonathan Lethem
The reason 99% of all stories written are not bought by editors is very simple. Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home. — John Y. Campbell
Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise. — Philip Roth
Reading fiction not only develops our imagination and creativity, it gives us the skills to be alone. It gives us the ability to feel empathy for people we've never met, living lives we couldn't possibly experience for ourselves, because the book puts us inside the character's skin. — Ann Patchett
I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil. — Flannery O'Connor
I read recipes the same way I read science fiction. I get to the end and say to myself "well, that's not going to happen — Rita Rudner
Contemporary Art Quotes
If Graffiti is art and art is a crime then how come piccaso never done time? — Melvin Glover
My work seen in its totality is a statement about the integration of the contemporary artist into an industrial society. — Herbert Bayer
The task of cinema or any other art form is not to translate hidden messages of the unconscious soul into art but to experiment with the effects contemporary technical devices have on nerves, minds, or souls. — Maya Deren
Graffiti writers will never stop. They'll just evolve. It's interesting what ideas people come up with and how it all extends forward. — Ben Eine
For me it's very important to turn Kiev into one of the main centers of contemporary art in the world. There is New York. There's London. And there will be Kiev. Everyone will come and say, 'Wow! — Victor Pinchuk
A wall is a very big weapon. It's one of the nastiest things you can hit someone with. — Banksy
I especially like to collect contemporary art. — Yusaku Maezawa
I began collecting artwork as a way to help young artists to promote their work as well as to increase awareness of contemporary art among the younger generation. — Yusaku Maezawa
I didn't want to make 'high' art, I had no interest in using paint, I wanted to find something that anyone could relate to without knowing about contemporary art. I wasn't thinking in terms of precious prints or archival quality; I didn't want the work to seem like a commodity. — Cindy Sherman
New materials are one of the great afflictions of contemporary art. Some artists confuse new materials with new ideas. — Sol LeWitt
Modern Literature Quotes
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent. — Henry David Thoreau
I studied English literature in the honors program, which means that you had to take courses in various centuries. You had to start with Old English, Middle English, and work your way toward the modern. I figured if I did that it would force me to read some of the things I might not read on my own. — Jeffrey Eugenides
Attention-deficit disorders seem to abound in modern society, and we don't know the cause. — Marilyn vos Savant
In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita, in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seems puny and trivial. — Henry David Thoreau
Perversity is the muse of modern literature. — Susan Sontag
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. — Ernest Hemingway
Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled. — Barbara Tuchman
Magic Realism is not new. The label's new, the specific Latin American form of it is new, its modern popularity is new, but it's been around as long as literature has been around. — Terri Windling
I love the Russian classics very much, the Russian classical literature. But I also read modern literature. As far as Russian literature is concerned, I am very fond of Tolstoy and Chekhov, and I also enjoy reading Gogol very much. — Vladimir Putin
Intensely moving but never sentimental, Academy Street is a profound meditation on what Faulkner called 'the human heart in conflict with itself'. In Tess Lohan, Mary Costello has created one of the most fully realized characters in contemporary fiction. What a marvel of a book. — Ron Rash
Going back to the noir fiction of the 30s, 40s and 50s. It's very contemporary. — Jeff Goldblum
A political philosophy (often called "political science" by practitioners who are not averse from verbal trickery) must deal with contemporary realities. If it does not, if it is charged with "ideals," it is merely a variety of romantic fiction, although it may not be recognized as such. — Revilo P. Oliver
Arnošt Lustig is one of the leading contemporary Czech fiction writers, and certainly the most important Jewish writer of Bohemia to have survived the Holocaust. — Josef Skvorecky
I don't know what issues concerning identity have helped contemporary fiction evolve to what it is now. All I know is that the range of voices that are being heard and published is a lot more diverse than when I was coming up. — Jessica Hagedorn
The main advantage of being a reviewer is that you read a lot. A lot of books get sent to you, and you have an amazing vantage point from which to observe what's going on in contemporary fiction - not only genre stuff, the whole spectrum. — Lev Grossman
Gaston Milhaud, like many of his contemporaries, sought to overthrow empirical positivism by insisting on the fundamental reality of the mind, but mind conceived in the Kantian sense. The knowledge of nature is symbolic, and there is no necessary connection between the phenomena and our fictions. — Fulton J. Sheen
Novels, except as aids to masturbation, play no part in contemporary life. — Gore Vidal
I'm always interested in contemporary fiction. — Kenneth Branagh
I can be very snobby about fiction, especially contemporary fiction. I can be kind of overly demanding, I think. But this is, I think, a good time. A lot of fiction comes out right now. So, I like reading the memoir. I love memoir, the biography, auto bio. — Annette Bening
Ultimately, I want a peak experience in reading, and that is sometimes difficult to find in contemporary fiction. I'm not interested in books that are just clever and well executed; polish doesn't impress me, and I don't care about a merely capable sentence. Life is short; I want a confrontation with high art. I want soul. — C.E. Morgan
I read a ton of fiction - historical, contemporary, literary, commercial, I love it all. — Megan Chance
As for whether genre considerations influence what I write, they don't at all, but I might sell more books if they did. The Night Journal is a hodge-podge of historical fiction, western, mystery, and contemporary domestic drama. It doesn't settle into a specific market, reviewers have a hard time describing it, and sometimes it gets classified weirdly in bookstores. But from a writer's standpoint, I like that it's hard to categorize. — Elizabeth Crook
One of my favourite contemporary fiction writers is a Texan, Ben Fountain. His extraordinary novel, Billy Lynn's Long Half-Time Walk, all takes place within the half-time show at a Dallas Cowboys football game. No one has better summed up the American appetite for spectacle, the link between sports and politics, and the absolute madness of George W. Bush's Iraq War. — Adam Hochschild
Journeys become very good metaphors. They always have the character put into circumstances that reveal him. If I had based my characters in New York and had them just sitting and thinking about life, it would be like what contemporary U.S. fiction is about. That is very heavy, literally, for me. It doesn't become mainstream enough because the pages don't turn themselves. — Karan Bajaj
Not a lot of contemporary fiction is written about brothers and sisters. Salinger's Franny and Zooey was an inspiration for me. In Franny and Zooey, the sister gets in trouble and the brother comes to help her out. But I wanted to make sure that in my novel the sister had more to do than lie around on a sofa muttering, which is what Franny does for two-thirds of Salinger's novel. — K. M. Soehnlein
I started reading contemporary fiction in college or right after college. It wasn't as if I was steeped in experimental minimalism when I was twelve or something. I was reading The Witch of Blackbird Pond. — Leni Zumas
I don't know if it's something that we as a species are hardwired for or if it's more of a contemporary phenomenon related to technology and rapid dissemination of data. I did know that whatever its cause or nature, I wanted to interrogate this phenomenon. But the only way for me to do that, the only tool I have to dissect it with, is a fictional narrative. — Ron Currie Jr.
It's the fantasy of first love. If you've been married for 400 years, as I have, it's nice to experience first love again and you can vicariously through a book. And it is such a fantasy. It takes you away from doing the dishes and the laundry. I think of this as a contemporary romance rather than erotic fiction. — E. L. James
Most of my writer friends are women, and they're all extremely talented, so of course I think the state of contemporary fiction for women is pretty great. Which is to say there is a ton of amazing work out there. These women are writing hard. There's much to be said. We're on it, chief. — Jami Attenberg
Most contemporary fiction sucks. It's intellectually dishonest, often morally dishonest. It's cheap and easy. It pretends to be deep but is really quite shallow. — Dale Peck
The problem with kitsch is that it is all too profound, manipulating deep libidinal and ideological forces, while true art knows how to remain at the surface, how to subtract it's subject from it's deepest context of historical reality. The same goes for contemporary art, where we often encounter brutal attempts to return to the Real, to remind the spectator or reader that he is perceiving a fiction, to awaken him from a sweet dream. — Slavoj Žižek
Anyway I read more contemporary poetry than contemporary fiction so my mind goes first to a kind of crass "conceptualism" that repeats vanguard gestures of the past minus the politics and historical context. — Ben Lerner
I think the anti-intellectualism of a lot of contemporary fiction is a kind of despairing of literature's ability to be anything more than perfectly bound blog posts or transcribed sitcoms. — Ben Lerner
Southern writing is regional: it includes dialect, settings, and cultural traditions from that region. However the themes and story conflicts are universal. My challenge is to write regional fiction without falling into the trap of nostalgia. There are important issues facing the south that I believe should be raised in the stories to make them contemporary, believable, and relevant to today's readers. — Mary Alice Monroe
Aurelie Sheehan's absorbing stories have depth miles beneath their compelling surface. They radiate a wisdom, beauty and originality rare in contemporary fiction. — Frederic Tuten
It's not just what Christian fiction lacks I appreciate - it's what it offers. The variety is vast: contemporary, historical, suspense, mysteries, adventure, young adult, romance, fantasy, science fiction. — Randy Alcorn
Richard Gavin is one of the bright new stars in contemporary weird fiction. His richly textured style, deft character portrayal, and powerful horrific conceptions make every one of his tales a pleasure to read. — S. T. Joshi
Jax Cassidy is a brilliant new voice in contemporary fiction. Full of heat, seduction, and romance, her winning characters are sure to capture your heart and find a place on your keeper shelf. — Gemma Halliday
The most underrated of all contemporary American writers of fiction. — William March
All ideas about identity, of course, fit perfectly into the social media wonderland we live in. They seem to really connect. There's a science-fiction aspect to our contemporary life. What's virtual, what's real. — Vijay Seshadri
The writing you allude to is a form of dissent, but it's also expressive of the need to evolve beyond what is turgid and stale in contemporary fiction. — Rachel Cusk
In high school I was drawn to the study of literature, poetry Shakespeare, contemporary fiction, drama, you name it - I read it. — Frederick Lenz
When I was a teenager, I was a voracious reader of crime fiction, but only contemporary books. — Michael Connelly
Aimee Parkison offers a distinct new voice to contemporary fiction. Her seductive stories explore childhood as a realm of sorrows, and reveal the afflictions of adults who emerge from this private geography. — Carol Anshaw
I would say that most of my books are contemporary realistic fiction... a couple, maybe three, fall into the 'historic fiction' category. Science fiction is not a favorite genre of mine, though I have greatly enjoyed some of the work of Ursula LeGuin. I haven't read much science fiction so I don't know other sci-fi authors. — Lois Lowry
So much of contemporary crime fiction is painful to read and obsessed with violence, particularly against women, and I can't read that. — Donna Leon
I write contemporary fiction, and that is what my readers want to read. — Alex Flinn
American Morons is the work of an original. Like Hitchcock or Ramsey Campbell, the style is precise, alert, and well-mannered, inviting us to enter Hirshberg's private world so that he may lock the door behind us. If there is anyone in contemporary fiction worth watching, it is Glen Hirshberg. — Dennis Etchison
Prose of the World is an enormously compelling and vivid study. The result is an ambitious, timely, and eloquent account of the relationship between early-twentieth-century fiction and the contemporary global novel in English. — Rebecca L. Walkowitz
If contemporary literary fiction doesn't read a bit like science fiction then it's probably not all that contemporary, is it — Warren Ellis
...Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk. — Henry Jenkins
The British and American literary worlds operate in an odd kind of symbiosis: our critics think our contemporary novelists are not the stuff of greatness whereas certain contemporary Americans indubitably are. Their critics often advance the exact opposite: British fiction is cool, American naff. — Will Self
Oddly enough, my favorite genre is not fiction. I'm attracted by primary sources that are relevant to historical questions of interest to me, by famous old books on philosophy or theology that I want to see with my own eyes, by essays on contemporary science, by the literatures of antiquity. — Marilynne Robinson
In Conclusion
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