More and more, I find myself turning away from everything relating to contemporary society. I don’t know how healthy it is, but I am creating a very private bubble that I live in.
The work that lasts over time is the work which still speaks to us when all contemporary interest in that work is extinct.
Few people in contemporary art demonstrate much curiosity. The majority spend their days blathering on, rather than trying to work out why one artist is more interesting than another, or why one picture works and another doesn’t.
That ‘adult contemporary’ status nearly killed me… C’mon, I’m not a teenager, but I’m not a dinosaur either.
The most striking development of the great depression of 1929 is a profound skepticism of the future of contemporary society among large sections of the American people.
‘Extraordinary’ is an original fairy tale, a contemporary story. But like a traditional fairy tale, it heads quickly into frightening, bloody territory. I am afraid for my book, as it goes out alone into the world, just as I was frightened for Phoebe as I wrote and rewrote her story.
The whole point of politics is to stay in touch, to be relevant to modern problems, to offer people relief from current worries, to give them hope based on contemporary experience.
Unfortunately, the Church’s position on most contemporary issues makes it hard to take them seriously.
I had read Harold Bloom’s ‘Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?’ Late in his life, having read everything, Bloom asked which books had given him wisdom. I had just read a bunch of contemporary novels that had no wisdom for me.
I think one of the reasons I’ve done so much period work is because I feel so depressed by how society chooses to represent women in contemporary work.
Her mother, Laurie Simmons, is a contemporary artist, and my stepmother, Cindy Sherman, is a photographer, so they’ve known each other forever. Lena and I were often at the same dinner parties when we were kids.
It is easy to gain a definite notion of the furnishing of colonial houses from a contemporary and reliable source – the inventories of the estates of the colonists.
I was told about ‘Misfits’ when we were in prep for ‘Chronicle’, and I wanted to watch it badly because I’m a fan of that kind of stuff. But I stopped myself because I was very careful about not getting too much contemporary influence.
You always try to do your own thing. One of the things I wanted to do was to write a book that combines some of the best traits of contemporary fantasy with some of the traits of the historical novel.
The Holocaust remains unique in contemporary Jewish consciousness for its capacity to engender the most visceral grief and abject pain.
Contemporaries appreciate the person rather than their merit, posterity will regard the merit rather than the person.
Jesu’s walls of distortion are uplifting in comparison to those of its doom-driven contemporaries. The band’s 2009 album ‘Infinity’ has its bleak moments, but that album’s single 49-minute song resolves into something inspirational and grandiose by the time it’s over.
FKA Twigs is stunning. She has beautiful contemporary and unique sound with an almost psychedelic vibe. Her music is great for the runway.
Just after graduation in 1966, like many of my contemporaries, I applied for research training at the National Institutes of Health. Perhaps because his wife was a poet, Ira Pastan agreed to take me into his laboratory, despite my lack of scientific credentials.
When the magazines talk about artists they talk about the Paul McCartneys, the Paul Simons, they never talk about me. So their readers and contemporary artists are never going to check me out because they’re not reading about me.
There are so many talented actors in my contemporaries and my seniors… I seek inspiration from each one of them.
Writing songs is about trying to connect with people on a deeper spiritual level – but I’m not a fan of contemporary Christian music.
The influence of cinema on all contemporary writers is undeniable. Because film is such a powerful and popular art form, we prose writers think cinematically.
The ‘beach read’ has become such a ubiquitous concept in contemporary literature that we assume it has always been around. In fact, the term only emerged in the 1990s, usually in book trade publications such as ‘Booklist’ and ‘Publisher’s Weekly.’
Buildings in modern cities have lost their metaphoric aspect. Much contemporary architecture is very fragmented and busy on the outside. It’s like a skin or a skull, but you don’t know what’s inside.
While I love to read contemporary fiction, I’m not drawn to writing it. Perhaps it’s because the former journalist in me is too inhibited by the press of reality; when I think about writing of my own time I always think about nonfiction narratives. Or perhaps it’s just that I find the present too confounding.
I still listen to Radio 1. I never really matured or progressed to Radio 2 or even Radio 4, like most of my contemporaries.
Then, when the Depression came, all of this changed completely. Since that time, the entire public is of a very different sort and there was not so much support for contemporary music in a direct way.
I love what many of my contemporaries are doing, especially people like Terry Gilliam, David Cronenberg, P. T. Anderson, and Alfonso Cuaron.
White people use their literature to maintain culture. That’s why you find references to Milton and Spencer and Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky in contemporary novels.
I’m a contemporary playwright in a postmodern world.
A sad fact of life lately at the Museum of Modern Art is that when it comes to group shows of contemporary painting from the collection, the bar has been set pretty low.
I don’t decide where I live. My wife decides. She’s a curator of contemporary art, and she works at an art museum, so we go wherever she has a job. All basements look the same, so I can write from whatever basement I happen to be living in.
My background is somewhat unusual, as I trained to be a ballet dancer. I worked in the theatre for eight or nine years as a contemporary dancer. But as an actor one does read Shakespeare and does try to learn the classics.
I think there’s something about a character facing the huge problems and challenges of the contemporary world and meeting them with – head on with courage, allowing for darkness and mistake, but ultimately always moral. That’s incredibly, incredibly inspiring, and that’s honestly what I think.
My dad used to sing in a quartet. He loved everything: adult contemporary, anything smooth. He’d listen to the quartets.
So many of the sounds that contemporary composers were trying to create were to be found in the traditional musics of the world. That was encouraging but also little daunting to think that you had to work so hard to be new and yet it was old.
When I graduated, everyone was like, ‘You got to do pop and R&B to make it,’ like very contemporary pop and R&B. I tried for a little while, but I just realized my voice wasn’t quite fitting some of the records that I was doing.
Marks of Identity is, among other things, the expression of the process of alienation in a contemporary intellectual with respect to his own country.
I don’t think anybody does contemporary R&B albums better than me.
After closely examining my conscience, I venture to state that in my historical novels I intended the content to be just as modern and up-to-date as in the contemporary ones.
Even the best novelists are rarely congratulated on the quality of their observations about contemporary life.
Profit and bottom line, the contemporary mantra, eliminates the very source of architectural expression.
The London Olympic Opening Ceremony was excellent. The mixture of old and new, of classic and contemporary was a beautiful reflection of Great Britain. Danny Boyle is a genius.
The number of contemporary artists who appeal to me is infinitesimal.
I wanted to know if the ‘Iliad’ in the original was as relevant and contemporary as it was in translation. I then started Latin. I had finally found something I enjoyed and was good at: dead languages!
Obviously, I love to do both contemporary and historical fiction. When a hint of a story grabs me, I try to go with it to see where it will take me whatever the setting.
It felt very fresh to me, and it feels very contemporary – this idea that conflict’s not being about good and evil and not necessarily being black and white. If you dig deep enough, you’ll often find that people do things because they feel that they have to as opposed to because they are evil.
The future is not so interesting for me because the future doesn’t exist. I am really focused on the contemporary.
I’m very interested in the idea of unusual museums, ones that are not necessarily contemporary art museums – more like historical collections or house museums.
One gets the impression that Elvis Presley does what his business advisors think will be most profitable. My advice to them: Put Elvis Presley in the studio with a bunch of good, contemporary rockers, lock the studio up, and tell him he can’t come out until he’s done made an album that rocks from beginning to end.
The engine of ancient society was religion but the engine of contemporary society, as I see it, is advertising.
