Top 51 Quotes About Modern Literature
#1. The two World Wars came in part, like much modern literature and art, because men, whose nature is to tire of everything in turn ... tired of common sense and civilization.
F.L. Lucas
#2. Modern literature seduces with insults, riddles, and inside stories.
Mason Cooley
#3. The message of guidance that neither politics nor philosophy nor religion now seems able to provide, we look for in modern literature.
Irving Howe
#4. The truth is, I can't help the way people perceive anything, from the role of financial industry in the economic crisis, to the place of women's fiction in the canon of modern literature, to the rank of mint chocolate chip ice cream as a favorite Baskin-Robbins flavor.
Erin Duffy
#5. 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
#6. Modern literature is a north-east wind
a blight of the human soul. I take credit to myself for having helped to make it so. The way to produce fine fruit is to blight the flower. You call this a paradox. Marry, so be it.
Thomas Love Peacock
#7. Perversity is the muse of modern literature.
Susan Sontag
#8. 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
#9. I hate brandy...it stinks of modern literature.
Harold Pinter
#10. We are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Burke; we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet, the people of Parnell. We have created most of the modern literature of this country. We have created the best of its political intelligence.
William Butler Yeats
#11. 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
#12. Twentieth-century American poetry has been one of the glories of modern literature.
Helen Vendler
#13. Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.
Oscar Wilde
#14. All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.
Ernest Hemingway,
#15. I think of science fiction as being part of the great river of imaginative fiction that has flowed through English literature, probably for 400 or 500 years, well predating modern science.
J.G. Ballard
#16. Greek mathematics is the real thing. The Greeks first spoke a language which modern mathematicians can understand ... So Greek mathematics is 'permanent', more permanent even than Greek literature.
G.H. Hardy
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. Of all the many and (thanks to a free press) the ever-multiplying blessings attendant upon the "glorious constitution" of literature, not the least precious and profitable to a modern cultivator of systems and syllables, in pamphlets, magazines, and folios, is the right of Quotation.
Samuel Laman Blanchard
#20. Samuel Marshak was one of the founders of modern Russian children's literature. Soviet children used to know his poems by heart, but only since glasnost have American editors shown any interest in issuing his poems here.
Michael Patrick Hearn
#21. Consider the millions who are buying those modern Aladdin's lamps called e-readers. These magical devices, ever more beautiful and nimble in design, have only to be lightly rubbed for the genie of literature to be summoned.
Steve Wasserman
#22. These weren't cheap modern books; these were books bound in leather, and not just leather, but leather from clever cows who had given their lives for literature after a happy existence in the very best pastures.
Terry Pratchett
#23. 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
#24. Modern, not bottom-dwelling literature like a carp.
Joe Wright
#25. In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.
Amy Lowell
#26. 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
#27. The failure of modern living is the failure of the imagination ... Literature is the royal road that enables us to enter the realm of the imagination.
Julius Lester
#28. I do not know where to find in any literature, whether ancient or modern, any adequate account of that Nature with which I am acquainted.
Henry David Thoreau
#29. 'The Lady's World' should be made the recognized organ for the expression of women's opinions on all subjects of literature, art and modern life, and yet it should be a magazine that men could read with pleasure.
Oscar Wilde
#30. Savages and modern artists are alike strangely driven to create something uglier than themselves. but the artists find it harder.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#31. Apollinaire said a poet should be 'of his time.' I say objects of the Digital Age belong in newspapers, not literature. When I read a novel, I don't want credit cards; I want cash in ducats and gold doubloons.
Roman Payne
#32. One has a sort of spiritual obligation to go back to the source material of the literature, to make contact with one of the seminal plays of the modern theater.
Arthur Penn
#33. I can assure you Ernest Hemingway was wrong when he said modern American literature began with Huckleberry Finn. It begins with Moby-Dick, the book that swallowed European civilization whole.
E.L. Doctorow
#34. The only authentic literature of the modern era is the owner's manual.
David Cronenberg
#35. 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
#36. It is a fact that the classics of Yiddish literature are also the classics of the modern Hebrew literature.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#37. Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.
W.S. Merwin
#39. MODERN PARENTS OF TWENTY FIRST CENTURY NEEDS SPIRITUAL BRAIN WASH WITH GREAT CLASSIC LITERATURE ACROSS THE GLOBE FIRST. NATURALLY,RESULTING OUR FUTURE GLOBAL DIRECORS(INDIVIDUAL CHILDREN) WILL RE-DESGN AND RE-DRAFT LIFE DIRECTION SOFT-WARE TO UP GRADE THEIR SOULS GOD SPIRITUALITY NEXT.
Various
#40. At the age of 12 I won the school prize for Best English Essay. The prize was a copy of Somerset Maugham's 'Introduction To Modern English And American Literature.' To this day I keep it on the shelf between my collection of Forester's works and the little urn that contains my mother's ashes.
Wilbur Smith
#41. The pagan gods are not dead, but can return to topple science with superstition and modern man with bestial pleasures that pre-date civilisation.
Richard Luckhurst
#42. National independence, and the preceding political struggles, helped create the space for literary creation in many post-colonial countries. Much of modern Indian or Chinese literature is inconceivable without the political movement for freedom from foreign rule.
Pankaj Mishra
#43. The literature of the immediate future will inevitably turn away from painting, whether respectably realistic or modern, and from daily life, whether old or the very latest and revolutionary, and turn to artistically realized philosophy.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#44. It is true that short forms of poetry have been cultivated in the Far East more than in modern Europe; but in all European literature short forms of poetry are to be found - indeed quite as short as anything in Japanese.
Lafcadio Hearn
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. (the modern writer's aim is) general revelation by suggestion (and) making a very tiny part do for a whole.
Sean O'Faolain
#48. Modern science fiction is the only form of literature that consistently considers the nature of the changes that face us.
Isaac Asimov
#49. Sanity
that is the great virtue of the ancient literature; the want of that is the great defect of the modern, in spite of its variety and power.
Matthew Arnold
#50. Modern writers are the moons of literature; they shine with reflected light, with light borrowed from the ancients.
Samuel Johnson
#51. In a single lifetime, roughly from 1865 to 1930, one finds the pioneering and patterning works of modern fantasy, science fiction, children's literature and detective fiction, of modern adventure, mystery and romance.
Michael Dirda
