What stuns me most about contemporary politics is not even that the system has been so badly corrupted by money. It is that so few people get the connection between their lives and what the bozos do in Washington and our state capitols.
I think I give far more space and play to avant-garde writing than any other contemporary textbook author. I want students to be able to decide for themselves which aesthetics are closest to their own. Still, while I try not to be a nostalgist myself, I suppose I am drawn to those poignant moments in our lives, rendered clearly and artfully.
A contemporary artist can use the findings of all epochs and all styles, from the most primitive literary expressions up to the most refined products of the baroque.
Those who are truly contemporary are those who neither perfectly coincide with their time nor adapt to its demands. . . Contemporariness, then, is that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disconnection.
All ideas about identity, of course, fit perfectly into the social media wonderland we live in. They seem to really connect. There's a science-fiction aspect to our contemporary life. What's virtual, what's real.
I suppose in a way most of my characters are non-consumers, not terribly interested in all the little baubles and artifacts of contemporary life.
So, for a book set in 2006, Open City evades certain markers, while it embraces certain others. Julius doesn't use a smartphone, and he doesn't discuss contemporary US politics in any fine detail.
Intensely moving but never sentimental, Academy Street is a profound meditation on what Faulkner called 'the human heart in conflict with itself'. In Tess Lohan, Mary Costello has created one of the most fully realized characters in contemporary fiction. What a marvel of a book.
I feel that what I do is always contemporary with the society I'm living in. . . If I wanted to explain myself, that's how I'd explain myself: that I'm a diarist.
Jim Harrison is someone I always enjoy, one of the great contemporary writers. I like Tim Ferris' Big Boom Theory. I'm getting into a different kind of reading, not straight novels.
As for whether genre considerations influence what I write, they don't at all, but I might sell more books if they did. The Night Journal is a hodge-podge of historical fiction, western, mystery, and contemporary domestic drama. It doesn't settle into a specific market, reviewers have a hard time describing it, and sometimes it gets classified weirdly in bookstores. But from a writer's standpoint, I like that it's hard to categorize.
Somewhere a portion of contemporary art has to exist as an example of what the art and its context were meant to be.
It's easy to say "This year in art sucked. " After all, about 85 percent of all shows of contemporary art are bad. But 85 percent of all art made in the Renaissance was bad.
I believe that the most important thing. . . is to revive in the whole Church that positive tension, that yearning to announce Christ again to contemporary man.
The level of vitriol against Jews and Christianity within contemporary Islam, unfortunately, is something that we are not totally cognizant of, or that we don't want to accept. We don't want to accept it because to do so would be to acknowledge that one of the world's great religions -- which has more than 1. 4 billion adherents -- somehow sanctions genocide, planned genocide, as part of its religious doctrine.
The reason why new concepts in any branch of science are hard to grasp is always the same; contemporary scientists try to picture the new concept in terms of ideas which existed before.
I don't think that modesty is the outstanding characteristic of contemporary politics, do you?
I listen to a mixture of old jazz, contemporary, pop, some world beat stuff and various odds and ends.
Eventually I realized that for contemporary philosophers conceptual analysis per se was an end in itself. For some, it was somehow supposed to lead to the truth about these phenomena, not just to tidy things up a bit.
[Bob] Dylan is a contemporary Don Quixote, at once besotted by the promise of America and yet also undermining it.