It was a staggering moment when I first heard the news. Lennon was a most talented man and above all, a gentle soul. John and his colleagues set a high standard by which contemporary music continues to be measured.
In my contemporary stories, I write about today's quilters, inventive techniques they use, and how technology has influenced their art. Novels set in the past let me have fun researching patterns that were popular and fabrics and tools available to quilters through history.
Without doubt, Thomas Edison is my greatest contemporary.
Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.
Contemporary art is an epoch of false money allied with false culture.
This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.
A contemporary painting is worth what someone is prepared to pay for it and not a predetermined figure.
If you read many contemporary literary novels today, you may notice that regardless of the subject matter there's a 'sameness' about them, the way in which thoughts are expressed and ideas, conveyed, the sometimes dogmatic application of what are, at best, useful maxims such as, 'less is more', the narrative techniques utilised, even the same, irritating, stylistic devices scattered like pepper all over the pages.
Science is not a system of certain, or -established, statements; nor is it a system which steadily advances towards a state of finality. . . And our guesses are guided by the unscientific, the metaphysical (though biologically explicable) faith in laws, in regularities which we can uncover-discover. Like Bacon, we might describe our own contemporary science-'the method of reasoning which men now ordinarily apply to nature'-as consisting of 'anticipations, rash and premature' and as 'prejudices'.
Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.
In contemporary society [the typical lady] is an archaism, and can't hardly understand herself unless she knows her own history.
Arnošt Lustig is one of the leading contemporary Czech fiction writers, and certainly the most important Jewish writer of Bohemia to have survived the Holocaust.
Poetry restores language by breaking it, and I think that much contemporary writing restores fantasy, as a genre of writing in contrast to a genre of commodity or a section in a bookstore, by breaking it. Michael Moorcock revived fantasy by prying it loose from morality; writers like Jeff VanderMeer, Stepan Chapman, Lucius Shepard, Jeffrey Ford, Nathan Ballingrud are doing the same by prying fantasy away from pedestrian writing, with more vibrant and daring styles, more reflective thinking, and a more widely broadcast spectrum of themes.
One of the biggest problems of our contemporary civilization is that there's been an interruption of transmission. People have no past in their present.
Most of my contemporary grant-getters are now doing something other than painting.
Contemporary art hates you.
One of the most famous lines in contemporary Russian poetry is "Erica makes four copies and that's enough. " That's the ethos we're aiming for. This is not to say I don't want lots of people to read my book, I do. I especially want people to read it who will feel better, and safer, or at least understood.
Jefferson never entertained the folly that he was of immigrant stock. He considered the English settlers of America courageous conquerors, much like his Saxon forebears, to whom he compared them. To Jefferson, early Americans were the contemporary carriers of the Anglo-Saxon project.
I didn't even realize that people bought contemporary art. . . that people actually paid for it.
When I was writing 'The Abstinence Teacher,' I really tried to immerse myself in contemporary American evangelical culture.