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.
The pseudoscience of astrology has no place in magick. Astrology has already died twice: once with the classical gods, and a second time after the Enlightenment. The complete failure of contemporary psychology to create anything other than a vocabulary of intellectual rubbish has encouraged astrology to resurface.
You see, the contemporary writer must write through his intimations of unease, while trying to elucidate them.
it's a rare day when she speaks in anything but platitudes--all those exhausted phrases and hand-me-down ideas that cram the dump sites of contemporary wisdom
So much of contemporary liberalism seems to be never having grown up.
Poles must understand history but we must also overcome it if it is obstructing our contemporary goals.
I think a lot of artists no longer want to participate in or be associated with narrative because of its corruptedness in contemporary culture.
A writer's ambition should be to trade a hundred contemporary readers for ten readers in ten years' time and for one reader in a hundred years' time.
I like terrific writing, but I also like a terrific story. My favorite books have both, and they're by contemporary, commercial American writers.
The history of the development of contemporary writing in Vancouver from 1946 to 1960 is pretty largely a one-man show, and that man was me.
I read very little contemporary anything.
The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.
Any of these contemporary war situations, whether civilian or soldier on either side - that's what I was interested in. The people who are being affected. Not so much the political speak at the top of the food chain, but the people who are affected by it on the ground.
I have a passion for modern and contemporary art.
When I try to sound like the contemporary sound, it never turns out that way.
The work that lasts over time is the work which still speaks to us when all contemporary interest in that work is extinct.
What need had the businessman to scribble or philosophize when he dominated the imagination of his time and the frantic materialism that was his principle of existence had become the haunting central figure in contemporary life?
I don't think contemporary writers spend a lot of time reading each other. Particularly writers of the same nationality.
contemporary poetry is a kind of Reykjavik, a place where accessibility and intelligence have been fighting a Cold War by proxy for the last half-century.
Fashion has always been nourished by the past. At the end of the day, where the inspiration comes from doesn't matter. It's what you do with it. How you treat it, how you translate it into a contemporary wardrobe. You put it in a shaker.