Quotes About Modern Writing

#1. In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities ... it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood.

G.K. Chesterton

#2. The default mode of modern writing about art is to despise any notion of singularity as so much overheated genius-fetishism.

Simon Schama

#3. I've always tried to insert consciousness and spirituality in my records, interpreting the writings of all cultures and religions and how they apply to life in modern times.

Rakim

#4. 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

#5. Unlike modern military codes, ancient texts are almost never purposely misleading, purposely scrambled ... indeed, literacy was so uncommon until classical times that the very writing of a message sufficed to keep it from almost everybody.

E. J. W. Barber

#6. 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

#7. Modern music is people who can't think signing artists who can't write songs to make records for people who can't hear.

Frank Zappa

#8. In any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties.

Milan Kundera

#9. What is a modern poet's fate? / To write his thoughts upon a slate; / The critic spits on what is done, / Gives it a wipe - and all is gone.

Thomas Hood

#10. The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.

Oscar Wilde

#11. I think that in France, we really admire American films, we admire their drive, we admire the modernity and ellipsism in the film and the writing and the style of acting, and we look at them perhaps in a way to see what we can steal from them, too, to make our own films more modern.

Francois Cluzet

#12. I think some of the best modern writing comes now from travellers.

Michael Palin

#13. I can think of no one more qualified to write about the modern South than Curtis Wilkie

Willie Morris

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

Joseph Fiennes

#15. There is not now, nor I suspect will there ever be, a le Carre novel with ninjas in it. Most serious novelists are wary of including ninjas in their writing. That's a shame, because many much-admired works of modern fiction could benefit from a few.

Nick Harkaway

#16. I can't blame modern technology for my predilection for distraction, not after all the hours I've spent watching lost balloons disappear into the clouds. I did it before the Internet, and I'll do it after the apocalypse, assuming we still have helium and weak-gripped children.

Colson Whitehead

#17. 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

#18. Remember The Poem ...

R.M. Engelhardt

#19. Because I write fiction that is based in the real world, it's going to lead people into some of the modern dilemmas and concerns and even catastrophes that they will think about in a new way.

Barbara Kingsolver

#20. What matters in modern music is not the part you can write down, the words and the tune, but the rest - the texture, the atmosphere, the references and associations.

Brian Eno

#21. I was willing to believe him that most modern writing was trash, on the evidence that so much old writing was trash; but I didn't put it that way to him.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#22. The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect.

Willa Cather

#23. I get fed up with all this nonsense of ringing people up and lighting cigarettes and answering the doorbell that passes for action in so many modern plays.

Graham Greene

#24. 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

#25. The important thing is not what we write but how we write, and in my opinion the modern writer must be an adventurer above all, willing to take every risk, and be prepared to founder in his effort if need be. In other words we must write dangerously

James Joyce

#26. 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

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

Sean O'Faolain

#28. The problem with being an author in this modern world is such: computers break often; books don't

Emma Iadanza

#29. 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

#30. My house is modern, but I like my writing room to be old fashioned. I write on a little wooden secretary desk.

Janet Fitch

#31. Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.

Philip Larkin

#32. In thirty years Iraq too has gone from being among the most modern and secular of Arab countries -with women working, artists thriving, journalists writing- into a squalid playpen for a megalomaniac.

Fareed Zakaria

#33. Writing is both bomb and bomb disposal-a necessary shattering of cliche and assumption, and a powerful defusing of the soul-destroying messages of modern life (that nothing matters, nothing changes, money is everything, etc). Writing is a state of being as well as an act of doing.

Jeanette Winterson

#34. 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

#35. [S]torytelling, in ancient and modern practice, is always a contemplation of the experience of time passing. A story depends on things not standing still, on the built-in condition of impermanence.

Joan Silber

#36. In modern America, anyone who attempts to write satirically about the events of the day finds it difficult to concoct a situation so bizarre that it may not actually come to pass while his article is still on the presses.

Calvin Trillin

#37. If I'm writing about a modern-day suburb, there's going to be details of the home and furniture, and if I'm writing about a historical period, those details, those pieces of the world are going to be there as well, but they'll be simplified, because I'm cartooning it.

Gene Luen Yang

#38. We have a history in country music of writing about the darker side of things - maybe not as much in modern times, but there's a lot of cheating and self-deprecation. We sort it out in song, in country music, as a genre.

Chris Stapleton

#39. 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

#40. Forcing modern speakers of English to not - whoops, not to split an infinitive because it isn't done in Latin makes about as much sense as forcing modern residents of England to wear laurels and togas.

Steven Pinker

#41. I felt condemned to obscurity and to celibacy. But when one is driven by passion, one can live on almost nothing, and I was driven by passion for writing. One does not starve in modern, Western societies, and one can do without such amenities as the telephone, a car, entertainment.

Alain Robbe-Grillet

#42. 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

#43. Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent world of contentment, drunkenness, and good humor, to a state of chronic edginess and the perpetual scanning of bank statements.

J.G. Ballard

#44. 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

#45. I cannot understand why some people try to write a history of photography that is separated from the history of modern art.

Jean-Francois Chevrier

#46. By all the rules of modern fiction there should have been gunsmoke mingling its acrid blue with the brown haze of corral dust. Dead men should have fallen and been trampled ...
Nothing of this sort happened.

B.M. Bower

#47. I went to an all-girls Catholic high school. The three things that they focused on were reading, writing, and arithmetic. My goodness, this is a novel idea in this modern society. I was really good at all three of these things. I was particularly good at math.

Ursula Burns

#48. 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

#49. Equal interchange of goods and service between buyer and seller is the keynote of tomorrow's business world when the vision of the modern business man awakens him to the wisdom of writing that policy into his code of ethics.

Walter Russell

#50. Modern as the style of Pascal's writing is, his thought is deeply impregnated with the spirit of the Middle Ages. He belonged, almost equally, to the future and to the past.

Lytton Strachey

#51. Men must speak English who can write Sanskrit; they must speak a modern language who write, perchance, an ancient and universal one.

Henry David Thoreau

#52. As far as modern writing is concerned, it is rarely rewarding to translate it, although it might be easy. Translation is very much like copying paintings.

Boris Pasternak

#53. When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away - even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.

Stephen Koch

#54. Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Edith Wharton

#55. I'm a simple hillbilly. I don't like eating modern, industrialized, fast food. I grew up eating home-cooked food. So when I'm traveling abroad, like when I recently received a six-month writing fellowship to Iowa in the U.S., I like to cook my own food.

Andrea Hirata

#56. I don't have any of the modern electronics at all. I know the Internet would be a distraction. I would see things that interested me and never get back to writing.

Elmore Leonard

#57. There's no scientific definition. A hymn ... is a song of praise to God. I think there were three real goals with our hymns that made them seem more in line with traditional classical hymn writing than with the modern worship movement and differentiate us slightly.

Keith Getty

#58. Modern reformers offer nebulous theories or write philanthropic novels. But your thief acts! He is as clear as a fact and as logical as a punch on the nose! And what a style he has!

Honore De Balzac

#59. Everytime a lawyer writes something, he is not writing for posterity, he is writing something so that endless others of his craft can make a living out of trying to figure out what he said. Course perhaps he really haden't said anything, that's what makes it so hard to explain.

Will Rogers

#60. Whosoever, in writing a modern history, shall follow truth too near the heels, it may happily strike out his teeth.

Walter Raleigh

#61. You couldn't even write me a paper about the roles you would dream of playing in modern musical theatre.

Elaine Paige

#62. I watch a lot of bad TV. I spend my entire day reading and writing, and after dinner my idea of fun is just to watch a lot of bad TV. That's how I relax and stay in touch with modern culture.

Nathaniel Philbrick

#63. My writing is called exotic or avant-garde because I write about rural places. Has it really come to this, that if you write about the country you are avant-garde? How did this happen? Modern agriculture and spaces are still so relevant.

Sarah Hall

#64. No nation ancient or modern ever lost the liberty of freely speaking, writing, or publishing their sentiments, but forthwith lost their liberty in general and became slaves.

John Peter Zenger

#65. Knowledge brings power. Hence writing brings power to modern societies, by making it possible to transmit knowledge with far greater accuracy and in far greater quantity and detail, from more distant lands and more remote times. Of

Jared Diamond

#66. 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

#67. I wanted to write a book that showed how the subjectification of the "the murderer" has changed little in over a hundred years, and to argue that this "exceptional figure" serves a conservative function in modern culture that bears closer interrogation than it has commonly received.

Richard Marshall

#68. I find the public reaction to writing - it's fascinating in this modern age. Of course people are able to interact with me and email me, and I get quite a few I suppose.

John Gimlette

#69. The writer is the Faust of modern society, the only surviving individualist in a mass age. To his orthodox contemporaries he seems a semi-madman.

Boris Pasternak

#70. The only protection as a historian is to institute a process of research and writing that minimizes the possibility of error. And that I have tried to do, aided by modern technology, which enables me, having long since moved beyond longhand, to use a computer for both organizing and taking notes.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

#71. Writing is the Latin of our times. The modern language of the people is video and sound.

Lawrence Lessig

#72. There is a difference between dramatizing your sensibility and your personality. The literary works which we think of as classicsdid the former. Much modern writing does the latter, and so has an affinity with, say, night-club acts in all their shoddy immediacy.

Paul Horgan

#73. I have some art, but I am a hobbyist. I would not consider myself an expert but in the course of writing this novel I became very familiar with the various movements in American Modern Art from 1900 onwards.

Nicholas Sparks

#74. Because I work quite slowly, I have to keep myself interested over a long research and writing period. So I can't see myself writing about modern middle-class Londoners anytime soon.

Stef Penney

#75. A theme that appears repeatedly in the writings of the social critics of the second half of the 20th century is the sense of purposelessness that afflicts many people in modern society.

Theodore Kaczynski

#76. 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

#77. With pantheism ... the deity is associated with the order of nature or the universe itself ... when modern scientists such as Einstein and Stephen Hawking mention 'God' in their writing, this is what they seem to mean: that God is Nature.

Victor J. Stenger

#78. I take pride in using fountain pens. They represent craftsmanship and a love of writing. Biros, on the other hand, represent the throwaway culture of modern society, which exists on microwave ready-meals and instant coffee.

Fennel Hudson

#79. I say decisively that nothing is so marked in modern writing as the prediction of such ideals in the future combined with the ignoring of them in the past. Anyone

G.K. Chesterton