Quotes About Contemporary

My idea is always to avoid nostalgia.

The contemporary church is so often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. It is so often the arch supporter of the status quo.

It's the contemporary woman that movies don't know what to do with, other than bathe her in a bridal glow in romantic comedies where both the romance and the comedy are artificial sweeteners.

With 'Bright Star' and with 'The Piano ' too, I felt a kind of sadness about it being in such a different era, because of my lack of experience with the era. And one of the ways I'd get over it is to remind myself that every film, even if it's contemporary, creates its own world.

The majority of Gothic manuscripts provide some reflections of contemporary life, because the idea of representing even biblical scenes in any but the idiom of their own times was quite alien to medieval artists.

Every amateur harbors the fantasy that his work is only waiting to be discovered; a second fantasy-that the established contemporary artists must also be frauds- is a necessary corollary

I occasionally play works by contemporary composers and for two reasons. First to discourage the composer from writing any more and secondly to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven.

The world is more like it is now then it ever has before.

Roosevelt followed it8 with a quirky essay in The Outlook entitled "Dante and the Bowery," arguing that literary stylists had grown too precious in eschewing contemporary imagery. There was as much epic grandeur and poignant example to be found in modern life, he suggested, as there was in Greek myth, or for that matter, thirteenth-century cosmology.

The Theatre of the Absurd, in the sense that it is truly the contemporary theatre, facing as it does man's condition as it is, is the Realistic theatre of our time; and that the supposed Realistic theatre—the term used here to mean most of what is done on Broadway—in the sense that it panders to the public need for self-congratulation and reassurance and presents a false picture of ourselves to ourselves is … really and truly The Theatre of the Absurd.

Saint-Simon was aware of the role of class struggle in history. Thus he divided contemporary French society into the industriels and the oisifs—those who worked, and the rich parasites who lived off their labor.

I guess maybe I try to make movies that are closer to real life than are many Hollywood movies. But I still try to stay within a commercial narrative, a contemporary American vernacular.

Things have never been more like the way they are today in history.

Wayne McGregor's 'Dyad 1929' is a good example of this capable British choreographer's work.

We took Beowulf, the epic poem in Old English, and put it right together with John Gardner's contemporary retelling. If you bring it into today, we really feel that it has something very fresh to say now.

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

The word 'modern' is a cliche.

I compose for the common man, for our epoch.

Writing is so fun precisely because if you take out the right adjective, the readers can decide what kind of book is in their hands. Suspension of disbelief should not be mandatory in contemporary writing.

Certainly being in California has encouraged a sustained commitment to rethinking the nature, purposes, and relevance of the contemporary arts, specifically music, for a society which by and large seems to manage quite well without them.

There's a phrase in Shakespeare: he refers to it as the 'hidden imposthume', and this idea of a hidden swelling is seminal to cancer. But even in more contemporary writing it's called 'the big C'.

I've not been an admirer of contemporary music since punk rock went off the boil in 1977, but once a year I'll listen to 'Spiral Scratch' by the Buzzcocks, or 'Hippy Hippy Shake' by the Swinging Blue Jeans. Otherwise, I can put up with Chopin or shakuhachi flute in the background.

Pipilotti Rist is a Swiss video artist I learned about pretty early on. She's one of the first contemporary artists I knew about and was really drawn to.

Ostensibly rigorous and realistic, contemporary conservatism is an ideology of denial. Its symbol is a smile button.