In Contemporary Quotes

#1. I'm always interested in contemporary fiction.

Kenneth Branagh

#2. Concern for the environment is a central tent of Islam, yet in contemporary debates over environmental issues there has been virtually no reference made to Islamic teaching

Mawil Izzi Dien

#3. Mother's interest in contemporary American artists emerged during the 1920s.

David Rockefeller

#4. I really don't take any interest at all in contemporary comedy.

Paul Merton

#5. Temptation isn't impersonal - there is an actual enemy doing the tempting. Mark treats Satan as a reality, not a myth. This is certainly jarring in contemporary cultures that are skeptical of the existence of the supernatural, let alone the demonic.

Timothy Keller

#6. I think one of the reasons I've done so much period work is because I feel so depressed by how society chooses to represent women in contemporary work.

Romola Garai

#7. I don't think anyone listening to my music needs any special knowledge. They don't need to have a background in contemporary music. They don't need to go to new-music concerts all the time in order to be able to understand it.

Missy Mazzoli

#8. I don't like most contemporary art. But I think if you talked to any person who's heavily involved in contemporary art, they'd say the same thing. If you go to a biennale, you don't expect to like much of it.

Tom Rachman

#9. Female Chauvinist Pigs is smart, alarming, and extremely funny. With nuance and humor, Levy has written both a convincing expos of sex and desire in contemporary America and an important cultural history. I'm giving a copy to my mother. And my sons.

Cathleen Schine

#10. Telling a story in a futuristic world gives you this freedom to explore things that bother you in contemporary times.

Suzanne Collins

#11. I wanted to write as well as I possibly could to deal with life-and-death problems in contemporary society. And the form of Wilkie Collins and Graham Greene, of Hammett and Chandler, seemed to offer me all the rope I would ever need.

Ross Macdonald

#12. My stories are full of facts; they have a beginning and an end. For that reason, they will never ... occupy a place in contemporary literature.

Italo Calvino

#13. We do treat books surprisingly lightly in contemporary culture. We'd never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we've read a book after reading it just once.

Ali Smith

#14. There is a central flaw in contemporary culture and a corresponding and related inability to address it. Society seems somehow unable to adequately help or protect itself. Normal citizens feel powerless, isolated and disturbed.

Michael Leunig

#15. While in theory digital technology entails the flawless replication of data, its actual use in contemporary society is characterized by the loss of data, degradation, and noise; the noise which is even stronger than that of traditional photography.

Lev Manovich

#16. I think a lot of artists no longer want to participate in or be associated with narrative because of its corruptedness in contemporary culture.

Rachel Cusk

#17. However ignorant a person may be, he or she can always moralize. And it is the propensity to moralize that takes up most of the space for public discussion in contemporary democracy.

Kenneth Minogue

#18. One of the most important tools in contemporary educational research is value added analysis.

Malcolm Gladwell

#19. Chronic boredom compensated or uncompensated constitutes one of the major psychopathological phenomena in contemporary technotronic society, although it is only recently that it has found some recognition.

Erich Fromm

#20. Wyndham Lewis is basically a pessimist, thinking of human beings as doomed animals or determinist machines. His theory of satire is based on this view, and he finds plenty of evidence to support it in contemporary practice.

Louis MacNeice

#21. What need had the businessman to scribble or philosophize when he dominated the imagination of his time and the frantic materialism that was his principle of existence had become the haunting central figure in contemporary life?

Alfred Kazin

#22. In contemporary art culture, where good looks and clever strategic planning of art careers have become a feature, professional practice may be taught in art schools like a branch of public relations or political science.

Michael Leunig

#23. In contemporary music, the challenge for me is to make the recorder sound as naturally expressive as, for example, the violin - without doing it too much and forcing the instrument. It is very easy to be overly expressive on the recorder, and finding the balance is quite difficult.

Michala Petri

#24. He is conscious of the past and present injustices, but he knows that real remedies are to be found in contemporary Christian compassion, and not in compensatory justice.

Neal A. Maxwell

#25. The dissolution of the pictorial into sheer texture, into apparently sheer sensation, into an accumulation of repetitions, seems to speak for and answer something profound in contemporary sensibility.

Clement Greenberg

#26. We live in a modern world, and in contemporary music the central fact is contamination. Not the contamination of disease but the contamination of musical styles. If you find this in me, that is good.

Ennio Morricone

#27. In contemporary parlance, sex is biological and gender is socially constructed.

Rebecca Solnit

#28. When the Domaine Musical started up, I wasn't part of it. They were the major players in contemporary music at that time, braodcasting old and new composers' work. And I wasn't one of them.

Luc Ferrari

#29. Scholars tell us that there was no word in ancient Latin or Greek for "self" as it is understood in contemporary usage.

James Carroll

#30. We must not fail to recognise that television can be a hugely positive influence in children's lives, one of the greatest educators in contemporary society and an increasing influence on all the children followed in 'Child of Our Time.'

Robert Winston

#31. These wealthy people were very interested in contemporary music. They wanted to help diffuse it and get it to be known to other people.

Elliott Carter

#32. Sometimes I imagine that there's a binary division going on in contemporary practice that has to do with chromatic versus diatonic. I notice that I tend to listen in a diatonic sense, that I register a pitch as a member of a diatonic scale, even in a non-tonal context.

Paul Lansky

#33. 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

#34. White people use their literature to maintain culture. That's why you find references to Milton and Spencer and Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky in contemporary novels.

Ntozake Shange

#35. 'Once Upon a Time', 'Mirror Mirror' - those shows and films focus on women and their conflict with one another. What the heck is going on in contemporary fairy tales? Women are not dominating the world; they are not evil.

Jack Zipes

#36. Barack Obama is an elegant and literate man with a cosmopolitan sense of the world. He is widely read in philosophy, literature, and history - as befits a former law professor - and he has shown time and again a surprising interest in contemporary fiction.

Teju Cole

#37. One of the most highly developed skills in contemporary Western civilization is dissection: the split -up of problems into their smallest possible components. We are good at it. So good, we often forget to put the pieces back together again.

Alvin Toffler

#38. The Democratic Party's rigidly pro-choice stance is one of the more unyielding positions in contemporary American politics.

Ross Douthat

#39. The Church in contemporary America does not need more strategies, steps, or keys to the Christian life. The Church needs truth, and more specifically, the great foundational truths of historical Christianity.

Charles Leiter

#40. In this tour around the world I was not interested in contemporary buildings because I had seen contemporary buildings actually until they came out of my ears in a sense.

Minoru Yamasaki

#41. Sex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character.

Mary McCarthy

#42. For most of the movies that I've done, we've shot in a contemporary house, in contemporary clothes, speaking in a contemporary way. So, I really enjoy that. It really helps.

Eve Hewson

#43. Serial killers may stand apart from society, but they are able to blend in even better than 'normal' people as they are camoflaged in contemporary anonymity.

Kurt Jensen

#44. Critics often point to historical issues such as slavery, upon which many Christians did act inconsistently, in an effort to invalidate Christian participation in contemporary social issues.

H. Wayne House

#45. But, number one, I think traditional noir doesn't work in contemporary storytelling because we don't live in that world anymore.

Brian De Palma

#46. While I know that the beautiful, the spiritual and the sublime are suspect today, I have begun to stop resisting the constant urge to deny that beauty has a valid right to exist in contemporary art.

Ian Hornak

#47. 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

#48. The lust for affluence in contemporary society has become psychotic; it has completely lost touch with reality.

Richard J. Foster

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. Not the free individual but the lost individual; not Independence but isolation; not self-discovery but self-obsession; not the conquer but to be conquered; these are major states of mind in contemporary imaginative literature.

Robert A. Nisbet

#52. I had always had a deep interest in social science, history. So even when I was in high school, I was debating, and in college debating, and interested in contemporary events.

James Heckman

#53. Finding a master of the dark art of ninjutsu in modern westernized Japan seems as unlikely as finding an active practitioner of the magic of Merlin in contemporary industrialized England.

Stephen K. Hayes

#54. An obituary should be an exercise in contemporary history, not a funeral oration.

Peter Utley

#55. Few people in contemporary art demonstrate much curiosity. The majority spend their days blathering on, rather than trying to work out why one artist is more interesting than another, or why one picture works and another doesn't.

Charles Saatchi

#56. In my experience as a psychotherapist, I have found that stress underlies most of the psychological, social, and medical problems people face in contemporary society. If we can get a handle on stress, we can take care of most of the problems we face in our lives.

Jed Diamond

#57. Everything in contemporary society discourages interiority. More and more of our exchanges take place via circuits, and in their very nature those interactions are such as to keep us hovering in the virtual now, a place away from ourselves.

Sven Birkerts

#58. The findings in contemporary social sciences are helping us understand that we can find other ways to educate people and act against injustice and corruption in our society.

Tariq Ramadan

#59. I love fashion. What I love is the ability to express yourself, to be able to make a product and shoot an ad campaign that tosses you out into the world and lets you have a voice in contemporary culture, iconography. I felt a little bit neutered not having that voice.

Tom Ford

#60. 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

#61. There are so many different criteria for my collecting, and I have to confess that the goalposts do shift. But obviously, with my background, I am particularly drawn to things that have been documented in contemporary magazines.

Hamish Bowles

#62. 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

#63. Novels, except as aids to masturbation, play no part in contemporary life.

Gore Vidal

#64. But exceptional performance depends not only on the groundwork we lay through Deliberate Practice; it also requires the right working conditions. And in contemporary workplaces, these are surprisingly hard to come by.

Susan Cain

#65. Some trace in contemporary works of these extraordinary names which had so strongly awakened our curiosity.

Alexandre Dumas

#66. Snobbery is not merely a silly human weakness but something basic in the mentality of modern man-a symptom which reflects the general sickness, the dislocation of social and cultural values in contemporary civilization.

Arthur Koestler

#67. 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

#68. This is familiar in contemporary politics.

Lin-Manuel Miranda

#69. In contemporary American culture, the religions are more and more treated as just passing beliefs - almost as fads - rather than as the fundaments upon which the devout build their lives.

Stephen L. Carter

#70. There are no categories in contemporary art. There are no rules. Artists are given the freedom to make and create whatever they please and call it whatever they please. I identify with that system, or lack of system, much more than I do the landscape of contemporary publishing.

James Frey

#71. In grades 1 through 4 these books introduce the child to U.S. society - to family life, community activities, ordinary economic transactions, and some history. None of the books covering grades 1 through 4 contain one word referring to any religious activity in contemporary American life.

Paul Vitz

#72. The mathophobia endemic in contemporary culture blocks many people from learning anything they recognize as 'math,' although they may have no trouble with mathematical knowledge they do not perceive as such.

Seymour Papert

#73. What I wanted to try and figure out was, okay, in contemporary 21st century life the alienation between the self and the land around you or the self and even the urban landscape. You name it.

DJ Spooky

#74. In contemporary society [the typical lady] is an archaism, and can't hardly understand herself unless she knows her own history.

Emily James Smith Putnam

#75. I am an architect. I try to feel the transparency in contemporary buildings and I try to understand the transparency in Zen poetry. I just want to mix all those things.

Luis Gonzalez

#76. 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

#77. Mother liked beauty wherever she found it, and she found it in many different places, both in nature and in contemporary art. And that's where they pretty much parted company. Father ... anything that was abstract would to him automatically be not very good.

David Rockefeller

#78. It's become very popular in contemporary films to have the twist ending.

Bill Paxton

#79. There is a small world of people who are very interested in contemporary art and a slightly bigger world of people who look at contemporary art. But then there is a much larger world that doesn't realise how influential art is on things that they actually look at.

Marc Jacobs

#80. Most problems in contemporary churches can be explained by the fact that members have never decided to follow Christ.

Dallas Willard

#81. Spending $100 million on a fancy gym is completely unremarkable in contemporary American higher education. Yet $10 million for a really good online biology course that could serve millions of students is seen as an outlandish, unaffordable expense.

Kevin Carey

#82. No, you're not, Marissa says. You were just the victim of the blatant misogynistic and ridiculous hierarchy that is high school in contemporary society. You have to take the power back.

Lauren Barnholdt

#83. An effective proclamation of the Gospel in contemporary Western society will need to confront directly the widespread spirit of agnosticism and relativism which has cast doubt on reason's ability to know the truth, which alone satisfies the human heart's restless quest for meaning.

Pope John Paul II

#84. There has been a vast output of critical studies in contemporary poetry, some of them first rate, but I do not think that , as a rule, a poet should read them.

W. H. Auden

#85. However, neither rule of law nor political accountability exists in contemporary China any more than they did in dynastic China.

Francis Fukuyama

#86. I think it has other roots, has to do, in part, with a general anxiety in contemporary life ... nuclear bombs, inequality of possibility and chance, inequality of goods allotted to us, a kind of general racist, unjust attitude that is pervasive.

Leonard Baskin

#87. The relation of photography and language is a principal site of struggle for value and power in contemporary representations of reality; it is the place where images and words find and lose their conscience, their aesthetic and ethical identity.

William J. Mitchell

#88. 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

#89. When I was writing 'The Abstinence Teacher,' I really tried to immerse myself in contemporary American evangelical culture.

Tom Perrotta

#90. Given the unprecedented ignorance of the Bible in contemporary America, it is likely that more young Americans will only know the Noah of 'Noah.' We can only hope that the film offers even a fraction of the wisdom of the original.

Dennis Prager

#91. My influences were from Europe from between 1900 and 1945. My favorite artists were Egon Schiele or Edvard Munch. I wasn't interested in contemporary art at all.

Tracey Emin

#92. The earliest phase of social formations found in historical as well as in contemporary social structures is this: a relatively small circle firmly closed against neighboring, strange, or in some way antagonistic circles.

Georg Simmel

#93. We hope that general readers with an interest in Japan will find in these accounts of fieldwork a wide spectrum of illustrations of the grassroots realities of everyday life in contemporary Japanese communities, companies, institutions, and social movements.

Theodore C. Bestor

#94. As Pierre Bourdieu was later to point out in describing a similar economy of trust in contemporary Algeria: it's quite possible to turn honor into money, almost impossible to convert money into honor.

David Graeber

#95. I'm interested in contemporary vision - the flicker of chrome, reflections, rapid associations, quick flashes of light. Bing! Bang!

James Rosenquist

#96. The Cold War in Africa is one of the darkest, most disgraceful pages in contemporary history, and everybody ought to be ashamed.

Ryszard Kapuscinski

#97. Contemporary bands often will do tour-only releases pressed and sold only in Australia. Crikey!

Henry Rollins

#98. Because all of us are so ready to talk about the world we live in. We are ready to have a publishing industry that is of that world.

Mira Jacob

#99. Or else I may do something I'm pretty sure you'll hate me for in the mornin'." The low huskiness of his voice washed over her like a heated caress, sending shivers down her spine, and obliterating whatever defenses she'd manage to build against him.

J.M. Stewart

#100. I realized then that both Gladys and Norm were smiling at about the time I realized that Max and I were acting like lunatics.
"I don't think she's tied up in knots anymore, Gladie," Norm observed.
"She is, dear, just not ones she wants to untie," Gladys remarked.

Kristen Ashley