Top 58 Quotes About Contemporary Literature
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. The way contemporary literature is emerging, soon we can expect "Item poetry" in novels.
Himmilicious
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. They smell your breath
Lest you have said: I love you,
They smell your heart:
These are strange times, my dear.
From the poem Strange Times, My Dear, in the PEN Anthology of Contemporary Literature
Ahmad Shamlu
#7. Contemporary literature in the West has shown some signs of ethical change.
Lafcadio Hearn
#8. Nursing is more than a career; it is a calling. Nurses are remarkable. Yet contemporary literature largely neglects them.
Alexandra Robbins
#9. 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
#10. What we've done is make the categories of science fiction and fantasy larger, freer, and more inclusive than any other genre of contemporary literature. We have room for everybody, and we are extraordinarily open to genuine experimentation.
Orson Scott Card
#11. 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
#12. People like to complain about the state of contemporary literature, but I can only assume they don't read it very widely.
Laura Miller
#13. Perhaps forgiveness wasn't a singular event, but a progression, or better, a dance that took some figuring before you could perform the steps.
Bonnie Grove
#14. For some reason, people try to fill you with food when you're filled with grief. I didn't need food. I needed a reason to keep living
Priscille Sibley
#15. As much as any contemporary writer, Murakami grasps the bewildering fluidity of commoditized life.
Japan Foundation
#16. 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
#17. It's okay to dress up like another person, but never try to be someone else. Just try to be yourself, because that's what makes you special. Oh, and watch out if a dragon ever starts to dance ballet.
Jeff Hutchins
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. Contemporary writers annoyed him, he found their worlds insular, their style too self-conscious and ironic. Theirs was not a literature that belonged to him.
Christos Tsiolkas
#21. When you're used to being in dangerous situations, you develop a sixth sense about your surroundings, about where possible enemies might be lurking, how many steps it will take to reach the next corner on a dead run, the best hiding places if bullets start to fly...
Mark Zero
#22. 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
#23. I admire American literature, both contemporary and classic - 'Moby-Dick' is just about the best book in the world - and I admire British literature for its insistence on dealing with social class. It may have been an influence.
Per Petterson
#24. Much contemporary verse reads like failed short-short stories rather than failed poetry.
Alice Fulton
#25. 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
#26. I think that the cultural dominance of narrative forms that seduce you with character and plot perhaps at the expense of ideas, like The Magic Mountain [won't last]. Starvation sharpens the appetite.
David Mitchell
#27. There are no backwaters where things can breed - our connectivity is so high and so global that there are no more Seattles and no more Haight-Ashburys. We've arrived at a level of commodification that may have negated the concept of counterculture.
William Gibson
#28. When she was living one of her fantasies she felt like a bird, the freedom of its wings letting her soar without earthly boundaries, enabling her to look on to her vividly imagined scenes from a great height.
Wendy Anne Gibbins-Lekkou
#29. ... she was a pudding of immaturity and precocious wisdom that had not yet set into a stable mold.
Mark Zero
#30. 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
#31. 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 Reymont
#32. The main differences between contemporary English and American literature is that the baleful pseudo-professionalism imparted by all those crap M.F.A. writing programs has yet to settle like a miasma of standardization on the English literary scene. But it's beginning to happen.
Will Self
#33. How can you be kissing at a time like this? Have you no respect for the dead?
Mark Zero
#34. Mystery keeps man alive; it opens his ears, his eyes, and his mind! Find a mystery and try to solve it!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#35. This is the difference between U.S. Latina/o letters and Latina/o Letters from Latin America: In the United States, writing is a business. In Latin America, writing is life and death.
Daniel Pena
#36. In high school I was drawn to the study of literature, poetry Shakespeare, contemporary fiction, drama, you name it - I read it.
Frederick Lenz
#37. 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
#39. Through helping one another, you can often eliminate the prefix 'im' from the word impossible!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#40. The most prevalent poetic representation of contemporary experience is the mimesis of disorientation by non sequitor.
Tony Hoagland
#41. When death becomes an escape, when it becomes attractive, the purpose of life is fulfilled. To teach one it's futility, it's worthlessness, that is the purpose of life. Incongruously, its value lies in having imparted that lesson.
Bhanggi
Faiqa Mansab
#42. Never run upstairs when someone's chasing you. Don't try to quick-draw a man who already has his gun out. Never light a match in the dark in a strange building. Half of staying safe is just keeping your head and being prudent.
Mark Zero
#43. 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
#44. As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store.
William H Gass
#45. Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.
W.S. Merwin
#46. Ari's words felt like drops of sunlight upon my skin, and my frame was burning with longing.
Petra March
#47. Yet torture is above all an art, an artistic discipline just like literature , cinema, or contemporary dance. All detained in the City-State ghettos bitterly missed the torturers of yesteryears, those monsters who worked with the precision of a Swiss watch-maker.
Fiston Mwanza Mujila
#48. And I had just kissed my ex-girlfriend, who had cried, while my current girlfriend was in jail. So far, it had not been my best day.
Mark Zero
#49. I congratulate you on your success stealing the painting.
Mark Zero
#50. Young girls think they know what their hearts desire, what they want the most. When really, we know nothing of love, devotion and utter loyalty. Not until we break our own hearts when we learn that what we desire is nothing like what we thought it would be. ~Papercut Doll
Alexia Purdy
#51. I called it a baptism in flaming ink that forced me to shed my shyness about recognizing myself as a poet and to accept the fact that life had never given me any choice in the matter. And then I had to discover exactly what that meant.
Aberjhani
#52. Words, to me, are the same as an instrument is to a musician. I never know where this typewriter is going to take me until I begin. I never know what I'm feeling until I read over what I have written.
Tessa Emily Hall
#53. To recount modern life one has to have characters with iPads and smart phones who take trains and planes, and to be aware how this alters consciousness, identity, and the kind of experiences people have. They are constantly exposed to contact from everyone they know and many they don't.
Tim Parks
#54. 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
#55. This isn't some LA country rock jam reminiscing on the pyschtotropic pot pansies of Haight Ashbury . This is the soot and smut of London mate !
Saira Viola
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. The French have a penchant for absolutism, for thinking that things are all one way or all another, which is why their politics are marked by a general inability to compromise and why they tend to hold their personal opinions until the bitter end, even after they have clearly lost an argument.
Mark Zero
