Modern Writers Quotes

#1. If you look at any list of great modern writers such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, you'll notice two things about them: 1. They all had editors. 2. They are all dead. Thus we can draw the scientific conclusion that editors are fatal.

Dave Barry

#2. Modern writers are the moons of literature; they shine with reflected light, with light borrowed from the ancients.

Samuel Johnson

#3. The Inklings were comrades who have been touched by war, who view life through the lens of war, yet who look for hope and found it, in fellowship, where so many other modern writers and intellectuals saw only broken narratives, disfigurement, and despair.

Philip Zaleski

#4. When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.

Howard Nemerov

#5. I really like Shakespeare a lot. The characters that he writes for females, I think, are really great and a lot more compelling than what modern writers write, which is weird because they didn't have actresses then.

Julia Stiles

#6. Roberto Calasso's survey of the renewed interest in myth demonstrates how decisive the gods' influence was on modern literature. Calasso is not only immensely learned; he is one of the most original thinkers and writers we have today.

Charles Simic

#7. virus writers lack the basic social and moral values and the "well-formed consciousness" that are the hallmarks of civilized modern societies.

Peter H. Gregory

#8. Most American writers don't get asked their opinion on current affairs, whereas in Europe and England, we still do. There are writers here who are the most sophisticated commentators, but they're not asked. Like Don DeLillo, who sort of forecast most of the modern world before it happened.

Salman Rushdie

#9. I was under the influence of the early modern masters, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck and Hemingway, especially, when I was a kid. I reacted against writers like Barth and John Hawkes. I did not care for the post-modernist stuff; my allegiance was to realism.

Robert Stone

#10. Henry Blodget does occasionally have a new idea. If you're making a point about aggregation or the emptiness of modern journalism, he's far from the best target. Try Huffpo - or Gawker writers whose souls have been corroded by irony.

Nick Denton

#11. Nowadays, the Internet decides if you're good, not the big man in the big office. No matter how important that man thinks he is, everyone else knows that he's not important anymore, and the Internet decides these things, here in the modern age.

Alexei Maxim Russell

#12. Put a very clever man next to a genius, his brightness will immediately turn to dullness!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#13. We teach young kids from 8 to 14 or 15 about their musical heritage through great songs written by American songwriters. We don't do too many modern composers, although we include songs from Billy Joel and other writers like him.

Margaret Whiting

#14. Modern tragic writers have to write short stories; if they wrote long stories ... cheerfulness would creep in. Such stories are like stings; brief, but purely painful.

G.K. Chesterton

#15. Except for two or three older writers, all modern literature seems to me not literature but some sort of handicraft, which exists only so as to be encouraged, though one is reluctant to use its products.

Anton Chekhov

#16. Only the pun remains. The pun, beloved of Shakespeare, children and tabloid headline-writers, is normally eschewed in the modern, sophisticated circles in which I move.

Arthur Smith

#17. Much modern prose is praised for its terseness, its scrupulous avoidance of curlicue, etcetera. But I don't feel the deeper rhythm there. I don't think these writers are being terse out of choice. I think they are being terse because it's the only way they can write.

Martin Amis

#18. When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, what distinguished the modern movement was the enormous honesty that writers, painters and playwrights displayed about themselves. The bourgeois novel flinches from such notions.

J.G. Ballard

#19. I read mostly Irish, African, Japanese, South American, and African writers. You can count on Scandinavian literature for a certain kind of darkness, a modern mythic style.

Chris Abani

#20. No man sings as beautifully as when his song is accompanied by a woman's voice.

Roman Payne

#21. Even the Sun shed tears once in a while

Sheeja Jose

#22. Honest and earnest criticism from those whose interests are most nearly touched,- criticism of writers by readers, of government by those governed, of leaders by those led, - this is the soul of democracy and the safeguard of modern society

W.E.B. Du Bois

#23. In the modern world, in which thousands of people are dying every hour as a consequence of politics, no writing anywhere can begin to be credible unless it is informed by political awareness and principles. Writers who have neither product utopian trash.

John Berger

#24. I think most serious writers, certainly in the modern period, use their own lives or the lives of people close to them or lives they have heard about as the raw material for their creativity.

Chaim Potok

#25. When one would ask most modern artists, poets, writers and other status quo fueled semi-intellectuals who Machiavelli was - was that an opera singer?

Martijn Benders

#26. Always do the things fast in your life, because some things are coming from the future towards you; they may separate you forever from doing the things you want to do! Never forget, some things are coming from the future, be fast!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#27. Man must spend much more time in extraordinary natural places to grasp much better how remarkable our planet is and to realise what a great privilege and what an enormous joy to be living here!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#28. The modern hero is the outsider. His experience is rootless. He can go anywhere. He belongs nowhere. Being alien to nothing, he ends up being alienated from any type of community based on common tastes and interests. The borders of his country are the sides of his skull.

Flannery O'Connor

#29. Most writers flinch at the thought of being completely honest about themselves. So absolute honesty is what marks the true modern.

J.G. Ballard

#30. Science fiction writers missed the most salient feature of our modern era: the Internet.

Jack McDevitt

#31. I do think that the modern India does belong to writers who are living in India.

Kiran Desai

#32. Hardboiled crime fiction came of age in 'Black Mask' magazine during the Twenties and Thirties. Writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler learnt their craft and developed a distinct literary style and attitude toward the modern world.

Charles Frazier

#33. I lay off a lot modern fiction and only rely on living writers for non-fiction work.

Henry Rollins

#34. I love new writing, new blood, modern works by unknown writers.

Joseph Fiennes

#35. The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity.

Henry David Thoreau

#36. Though this child came in with nothing but excess baby fat, chemical brain waves, and mother and son bodily toxins on his legs, he had a fate fit for a modern day demigod.

David Scheier

#37. In our modern age, there are writers who have heaped scorn on the very idea of the primacy of story. I'd rather warm my hands on a sunlit ice floe than try to coax fire from the books they carve from glaciers.

Pat Conroy

#38. Whatever their ideas or ideologies or religions are, always get along well with people!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#39. (the modern writer's aim is) general revelation by suggestion (and) making a very tiny part do for a whole.

Sean O'Faolain

#40. The proper worldview context for interpreting the Bible is not evangelicalism, Catholicism, the Protestant Reformation, the Puritans - or even the modern world. The proper context for interpreting the Bible is the context in which it was written - that of the ancient biblical writers.

Michael S. Heiser

#41. I would say that the writers I like and trust have at the base of their prose something called the English sentence. An awful lot of modern writing seems to me to be a depressed use of language. Once, I called it "vow-of-poverty prose." No, give me the king in his countinghouse. Give me Updike.

Martin Amis