Contemporary Quotes - Page 33

• If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself.

  Annie Dillard

  Understanding, Progress, Novelists

  Annie Dillard (1983). “Living by Fiction”, New York : Harper & Row

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• One of the most highly developed skills in contemporary Western civilization is dissection: the split -up of problems into their smallest possible components. We are good at it. So good, we often forget to put the pieces back together again.

  Alvin Toffler

  Civilization, Skills, Together Again

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• There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist fighting for peace by nonviolent methods most easily succumbs; activism and overwork.

  Thomas Merton

  Fighting, Violence, Form

  Thomas Merton (2009). “Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander”, p.81, Image

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• If I thought that any poem of mine could have been written by anyone else, either a contemporary or a forerunner, I should suppress it with a blush; and I should do the same if I ever found I were imitating myself. Every poem should be new, unexpected, inimitable, and incapable of being parodied.

  Robert Graves

  Unexpected, Should, Found

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• There has been a vast output of critical studies in contemporary poetry, some of them first rate, but I do not think that , as a rule, a poet should read them.

  W. H. Auden

  Thinking, Firsts, Study

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• For inspiration you go to the archives, you go to things of the past, but you still need to be contemporary for today. You can never forget the time you're living in because the past is the past and it will never come back.

  Nicki Minaj

  Inspiration, Past, Archives

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• A lot of my work reflects the incredible influence that America has had on contemporary African culture. Some of it's insidious, some of it's innocuous, some of it's invisible. It's there.

  Wangechi Mutu

  America, Culture, Influence

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• Nothing contemporary is as extreme or as strongly stated as what the Sex Pistols were able to do in their time.

  Julien Temple

  Sex, Pistols, Able

  Interview with Joshua Klein, www.avclub.com. April 12, 2000.

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• I wanted to revolutionise habits and contemporary life - to liberate nature, to free it from the authority of old theories and classicism... I felt a tremendous urge to re-create a new world seen through my own eyes, a world which was entirely mine.

  Maurice de Vlaminck

  Eye, World, Habit

  Maurice de Vlaminck (1967). “Dangerous corner”

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• I have a passion for modern and contemporary art. I spend a lot of time in museums; I particularly like the Guggenheim, MoMA in New York or LACMA and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, for example. I cannot wait for the Louis Vuitton Foundation to open.

  Delphine Arnault

  Art, New York, Passion

  "Delphine Arnault Rising". Interview with Miles Socha, wwd.com. April 14, 2014.

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• My real desire is to see people live in the modus of our time, to participate in the contemporary world, to release themselves from nostalgia, antiquated traditions, old rituals, meaningless kitsch and meaningless paradigms.

  Karim Rashid

  Real, People, Desire

  "Q&A: Designer Karim Rashid". Express Interview, www.washingtonpost.com. May 3, 2007.

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• Sometimes I think that I stay young and in touch with contemporary culture because of my children's interests. I'm so lucky to be surrounded by their talent and vibrancy.

  Polixeni Papapetrou

  Children, Thinking, Lucky

  "Stories from the Other Side: Polixeni Papapetrou Exhibits at Jenkins Johnson Gallery, NYC". Interview with Caia Hagel, logger.believermag.com. April 29, 2013.

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• We're living in a time when the sheer amount of language has exponentially increased. As writers, if we wish to be contemporary, I think we need to acknowledge that the very nature of the materials that we're working with - the landscape of language - is very different than it was a few decades ago.

  Kenneth Goldsmith

  Thinking, Wish, Different

  Interview with Dave Mandl, believermag.com. October 2011.

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• I think the anti-intellectualism of a lot of contemporary fiction is a kind of despairing of literature's ability to be anything more than perfectly bound blog posts or transcribed sitcoms.

  Ben Lerner

  Thinking, Contemporary Fiction, Literature

  "Despair strikes me as eminently reasonable and boring". Interview with Tao Lin, believermag.com. September 2014.

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• Anyway I read more contemporary poetry than contemporary fiction so my mind goes first to a kind of crass "conceptualism" that repeats vanguard gestures of the past minus the politics and historical context.

  Ben Lerner

  Past, Contemporary Fiction, Historical

  "Despair strikes me as eminently reasonable and boring". Interview with Tao Lin, believermag.com. September 2014.

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• FKA Twigs is stunning. She has beautiful contemporary and unique sound with an almost psychedelic vibe. Her music is great for the runway.

  Chelsea Leyland

  Beautiful, Unique, Sound

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• Clifford paints true-to-life characters with the same gritty touch as the best of Dennis Lehane. Straightforward and edgy, Lamentation gnaws with nail-biting tension on every page. A must-read for contemporary hardboiled mystery fans who appreciate the type of terse dialogue and real life conflicts and settings Elmore Leonard so richly brought to life.

  Robert Dugoni

  Real, Character, Appreciate

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• My art gives contemporary art a juvenile-delinquent phase. Its self-made style gleefully trashes conventions of beauty and society while pick-pocketing from the coolest underground styles and beliefs of the previous centuries.

  Steve Olson

  Art, Self, Giving

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• Much more than a 20th-century village storyteller, Cees Nooteboom stands as an impressive and inimitable voice among contemporary writers.

  Linda Simon

  Voice, Village, Century

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• I found that a lot of people ridiculed contemporary art. I decided I wanted to be involved in art everybody could understand.

  Jason Blum

  Art, People, Found

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• Jews with unconventional identities should not have to wrestle alone at the intersection where their tradition seems to clash with their integrity as loving human beings. Like Moses responding to the travail of his brothers (Ex. 2:11), a caring halachic Jewish community should respond seriously to the heartfelt appeal of our contemporary sisters.

  Vanessa L Ochs

  Brother, Integrity, Heart

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• Most people don't like to be confronted with an actual fact-of-life because it's difficult to metabolize. A painting of a bowl of fruit is much easier. It's for the same reason why we don't like going to the doctor. The diagnosis and x-rays are too honest. This is what creates the perception that contemporary art is shocking or suspicious.

  Adamo Macri

  Life, Art, Doctors

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• The genuinely significant creation, whether an idea, or a work of art, or a scientific discovery, is most likely to be seen at first as erroneous, bad, or foolish. Later it may be seen as obvious, something self-evident to all. Only still later does it receive its final evaluation as a creative contribution. It seems clear no contemporary mortal can satisfactorily evaluate a creative product at the time it is formed, and this statement is increasingly true the greater the novelty of the creation.

  Carl Rogers

  Art, Ideas, Discovery

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• I always wanted to be a journeyman actor. I wanted to be able to do comedy and drama, classical and contemporary. I like to do film and theater. And I pride myself on that diversity of being a journeyman actor.

  Wendell Pierce

  Drama, Pride, Diversity

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• I think we still do have a PR problem in the sense that these institutions portray themselves quite often as a museum without the contemporary wing. For a young cutting-edge person, why would you get into that sort of business, which is very clearly geared towards dead or almost dead people?

  Esa-Pekka Salonen

  Cutting, Thinking, Museums

  Source: www.pbs.org

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