Contemporary literature in the West has shown some signs of ethical change. — Lafcadio Hearn
A people's literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can. — Edith Hamilton
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
A contemporary artist can use the findings of all epochs and all styles, from the most primitive literary expressions up to the most refined products of the baroque. — Juan Goytisolo
Literature is the question minus the answer. — Roland Barthes
Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture. — Juan Ramon Jimenez
Schools provide safe spaces to talk about controversial issues, and literature presents characters portraying human experience in all its richness and contradictoriness. — Julia Alvarez
We write from life and call it literature, and literature lives because we are in it. — F. Sionil José
All great music is contemporary. If it's still alive and kicking, then it's contemporary. If it fades away, it was a period piece. It had its moment, and that was it. — Steve Reich
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. — Kathy Acker
Literature is air, and Im suffocating in mediocrity. — Armand Assante
Perversity is the muse of modern literature. — Susan Sontag
Twentieth-century Russian literature has produced nothing special except perhaps one novel and two stories by Andrei Platonov, who ended his days sweeping streets. — Joseph Brodsky
Literature is the supreme means by which you renew your sensuous and emotional life and learn a new awareness. — F. R. Leavis
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
Contemporary Fiction Quotes
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
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
Going back to the noir fiction of the 30s, 40s and 50s. It's very contemporary. — Jeff Goldblum
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
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
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
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
Modern American literature was born in protest, born in rebellion, born out of the sense of loss and indirection which was imposed upon the new generations out of the realization that the old formal culture-the "New England idea"-could no longer serve. — Alfred Kazin
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
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
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
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 Poetry Quotes
You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It's one of the great things poetry does. — Robert Morgan
You know I have about the same interest in jewelry as I have in politics, horse racing, modern poetry, and women who need weird excitement – none. — Cary Grant
Too many people in the modern world view poetry as a luxury, not a necessity like petrol. But to me it's the oil of life. — John Betjeman
Most poetry is very formal, but when a modern poet is formal he gets more attention for it than old poets did. — Robert Lowell
High and low culture come together in all Post Modern art, and American poetry is not excluded from this. — Diane Wakoski
Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca. — W. S. Merwin
The way in which modern German poetry follows theories reminds me of pupils who, scolded by their teacher for their insubordination, justify themselves by saying that they invented new rules of propriety according to which they are quite well- behaved. — Franz Grillparzer
The reason modern poetry is difficult is so that the poet's wife cannot understand it. — Wendy Cope
I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry. — Randall Jarrell
I had art as a major, along with English, French and History. I had dance, modern dance. In English I was allowed to write my own poetry, which I eventually got published. — Sally Kirkland
Modern Culture Quotes
The old Lakota was wise. He knew that man's heart, away from nature, becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans too. — Luther Standing Bear
One needs solitude and quiet to think. The cacophony of modern culture is designed to make that impossible. — Chris Hedges
Perhaps these ancient observatories like Stonehenge perennially impress modern people because modern people have no idea how the Sun, Moon, or stars move. We are too busy watching evening television to care what's going on in the sky. — Neil deGrasse Tyson
The Church cannot be content to live in its stained-glass house and throw stones through the picture window of modern culture. — Robert McAfee Brown
The equilibrium you admire in me is an unstable one, difficult to maintain. My inner life was split early between the call of the Ancestors and the call of Europe, between the exigencies of black-African culture and those of modern life. — Leopold Sedar Senghor
Forty-hour workweeks are a relic of the Industrial Age. — Naval Ravikant
I really like the city of Vienna. I like its art, its music and its architecture. In short, I like the culture that Vienna represents. What really captures me is the period around 1900 - the time of Freud, Schnitzler and Klimt. This is the period in which the modern view of mind was born. — Eric Kandel
Knowledge was inherent in all things. The world was a library. — Luther Standing Bear
I love and admire the American culture and the American dream. I learnt so many things about the American shoe industry and marketing strategies. I caught the secrets of American casual wear, that is elegant and wearable, retro and modern, and mixed it with an Italian touch, luxurious and handmade. — Diego Della Valle
Superheroes fill a gap in the pop culture psyche, similar to the role of Greek mythology. There isn't really anything else that does the job in modern terms. For me, Batman is the one that can most clearly be taken seriously. — Christopher Nolan
Contemporary Music Quotes
Hip hop music is important precisely because it sheds light on contemporary politics, history, and race. At its best, hip hop gives voice to marginal black youth we are not used to hearing from on such topics. — Michael Eric Dyson
The whole rise of new adult contemporary music and smooth jazz was a nice surprise. — Kenny G
Do I think all contemporary Christian music is good? No. — Amy Grant
Writing songs is about trying to connect with people on a deeper spiritual level - but I'm not a fan of contemporary Christian music. — Ryan Tedder
I always like to play very contemporary concepts of swing right next to New Orleans music because it highlights continuum. — Wynton Marsalis
I am a classical music lover - not necessarily the contemporary stuff, but the old stuff. — Eberhard Weber
Words that in their everyday surrealism have no parallel in contemporary writing... Music that mines the deep veins of fatalism in the Appalachian voice — Greil Marcus
I mean, people listen to music, and they like that, but I think in England, a lot of people don't like contemporary art. — Damien Hirst
I've never had any feeling of disconnection between the classical theater, or the contemporary theater, or musical theater, or the thing that we call opera. — Trevor Nunn
Underground electronic music is art - fundamentally it's based on contemporary art, culture, dance, and real music. If you look at EDM, how many of those cultural standpoints are the same? — Seth Troxler
Contemporary Christian Quotes
A great reformation and revival-it will happen the same way the early Christians conquered Rome. Their program of conquest consisted largely of two elements: gospel preaching and being eaten by lions, a strategy that has not yet captured the imagination of the the contemporary church. — Douglas Wilson
To be a Christian is to be a theologian-a student of God and his will. The contemporary disdain for theological content and emphasis on self-image and emotions were not shared by the apostolic church. — R. C. Sproul
The best proof that Christ has risen is that he is still alive. And for the immense majority of our contemporaries, the only way of seeing him alive is for us Christians to love one another. — Louis Evely
Ultimately our claim to know the one God only gains credence in the contemporary world as he demonstrates the divine presence through the way we live- through our lives as we connect our Christian belief with true Christian living. — Stanley J. Grenz
The contemporary Christian mind is starved, and as a result we have small, impoverished souls. — J.P. Moreland
The contemporary quarrel over church and state is not really about whether a wall of separation of church and state should exist or not... The real question is what does 'separation' mean? — James Davison Hunter
Rabbi Kushner writes from a wealth of Jewish wisdom and pastoral devotion, but his theology is, I find, is wholly in keeping with contemporary Christian thought. So far as there is an answer to the conflict between the goodness of God and the bitterness of suffering, this is it — Gerald Priestland
It is only when all our Christian ancestors are allowed to become our contemporaries that the real splendor of the Christian faith and the Christian life begins to dawn upon us. — Lynn Harold Hough
What really concerns me is for Christians to understand the fundamentals of evangelism in a way that is helpful in the contemporary scene. — Mark Dever
The overwhelming emphasis of contemporary Christianity: "Just do it." The overwhelming emphasis of Biblical Christianity: "It is finished" — Tullian Tchividjian
Literary Criticism Quotes
How dare anyone, parent, schoolteacher, or merely literary critic, tell me not to act colored. — Arna Bontemps
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion. — T. S. Eliot
Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticising. — D. H. Lawrence
The nearest approach to the infallible in literary judgment is represented in the colossal work of the teacher of all these three [Edmund Gosse, Edward Dowden and George Saintsbury], the greatest critic that ever lived - not an Englishman, but a Frenchman, the wonderful Sainte-Beuve. — Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
The two main ideas that run through all of my writing, whether it be literary criticism or political polemic are these: I am strong in favor of liberty and I hate fraud. — H. L. Mencken
In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning. — George Orwell
Literary critics, however, frequently suffer from a curious belief that every author longs to extend the boundaries of literary art, wants to explore new dimensions of the human spirit, and if he doesn't, he should be ashamed of himself. — Robertson Davies
Literary criticism is generally bunk. Nonsense. Usually based on self-serving post-intellectual bullshit. — John Fante
Strict rules of evidence would destroy psychoanalysis and literary criticism. — Mason Cooley
The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear -- and even, in certain respects, would be -- the most modern of critical movements. — Paul De Man
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
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
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
Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers -- such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a fa?ade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read. — Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
A particularly fine head on a man usually means that he is stupid; particularly deep philosophers are usually shallow thinkers; in literature, talents not much above the average are usually regarded by their contemporaries as geniuses. — Robert Musil
I'm a big believer in pairing classics with contemporary literature, so students have the opportunity to see that literature is not a cold, dead thing that happened once but instead a vibrant mode of storytelling that's been with us a long time - and will be with us, I hope, for a long time to come. — John Green
People like to complain about the state of contemporary literature, but I can only assume they don't read it very widely. — Laura Miller
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
For my students who are trying to learn the craft of writing in a writing class - contemporary literature is what's most useful. — Alan Lightman
When I saw what painting had done in the last thirty years, what literature had done - people like Joyce and Virginia Woolf, Faulkner and Hemingway - in France we have Nathalie Sarraute - and paintings became so strongly contemporary while cinema was just following the path of theater. I have to do something which relates with my time, and in my time, we make things differently. — Agnes Varda
Much contemporary verse reads like failed short-short stories rather than failed poetry. — Alice Fulton
The immediate success of the war poem anthologies ... proved that the war had aroused in a new public an ear for contemporary verse ... There has never before, in the world's history, been an epoch which has tolerated and even welcomed such a flood of verse as has been poured forth over Great Britain during the last three years. — Edmund Gosse
By the age of nine I had a thorough knowledge of contemporary Polish literature as well as of foreign literature in Polish translation, and I began to write poems in honour of a lady of thirty years. Naturally, she knew nothing about them. — Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont
In high school I was drawn to the study of literature, poetry Shakespeare, contemporary fiction, drama, you name it - I read it. — Frederick Lenz
Every few seconds a new book sees the light of day. Most of them will just be a part of the hum that makes us hard of hearing. Even the book is becoming an instrument of forgetting. A truly literary work comes into being as its creator's cry of protest against the forgetting that looms over him, over his predecessors and his contemporaries alike, and over his time, and the language he speaks. A literary work is something that defies death. — Ivan Klíma
For the judging of contemporary literature the only test is one's personal taste. If you much like a new book, you must call it literature even though you find no other soul to agree with you, and if you dislike a book you must declare that it is not literature though a million voices should shout you that you are wrong. The ultimate decision will be made by Time. — Ford Madox Ford
It's an absurd error to put modern English literature in the curriculum. You should read contemporary literature for pleasure or not at all. You shouldn't be taught to monkey with it. — Rebecca West
More than any other contemporary British playwright, Tom Stoppard populates his plays -- from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to The Invention of Love (his portrait of the poet and scholar A. E. Housman) -- with characters from life and literature. But one cannot always tell the difference between those who are real and those who are imaginary. — Mel Gussow
Like no other writer in contemporary American literature, Brock Clarke has a way of looking at us, I mean looking straight at us--warts, lots of warts, and beauty and hypocrisy and love, too, the gamut. And hes done it again in this brilliant The Happiest People in the World, a novel that is as hilarious and thought-provoking as it is ultimately, deadly, deadly serious. I for one am grateful hes out there--watching our every move. — Peter Orner
No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept. For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling. — Gertrude Stein
Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don't exist... — Adam Gopnik
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
A lot of my work comes from what in Asia is called the 'mind of wonder.' There is not a lot of 'mind of wonder' writing in contemporary Western literature. I think that's what appeals to the readers who are my fans. — Tom Robbins
In Conclusion
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