Contemporary Writing Quotes

The Pakistani writers are addressing change and what's happening today in the world. There is something completely contemporary in this writing.

I read a couple of books a week. About 80 percent of what I read is contemporary literature for adults. The other 20 percent is made up of non-fiction and children's books.

People used to expect literary novels to deepen the experience of living; now they are happy with any sustained display of writerly cleverness.

Modern, not bottom-dwelling literature like a carp.

'Life's That Way' was an extraordinarily difficult book to write, because it wasn't written as a book. It was written as a journal of events that were happening as I wrote it, without the space or time either to digest or analyze those events and without the hindsight and peace that writing in the aftermath would have provided.

People are more aware now of cities and of different ways of life. I suppose the writing I do is a bit in the past, and I'm not sure it's the kind of writing I would do if I were starting now.

The biographies and autobiographies are on the whole more impressive than the fiction of the last two decades, but the freakish best sellers among them are least likely to withstand the test of time.

People apparently only read mystery stories of any length. With mysteries, the longer the better, and people will read any damn thing. But the indulgent, 800-page books that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore, and people need to get used to that.

Perversity is the muse of modern literature.

Every Day Is for the Thief, by turns funny, mournful, and acerbic, offers a portrait of Nigeria in which anger, perhaps the most natural response to the often lamentable state of affairs there, is somehow muted and deflected by the author's deep engagement with the country: a profoundly disenchanted love. Teju Cole is among the most gifted writers of his generation.

I like having a paperback original. And until literature catches up with the culture - the violence, language, syntax, compression, concision, complexity and diversity that the Internet offers - books still make sense.

Writers are not obliged to deal with current events, but it happens that the big story of our times - the al-Qaida attacks on New York and the Pentagon, and the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - is being told in some of the greatest books of our time.

Visitation Street is urban opera writ large. Gritty and magical, filled with mystery, poetry and pain, Ivy Pochoda’s voice recalls Richard Price, Junot Diaz, and even Alice Sebold, yet it’s indelibly her own.

The attraction of horror is a mental, or even an intellectual, excitement, but the fascination of the repulsive, so noticeable incontemporary writing, can spring openly from some rotted substance within our civilization.

A people's literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can.

My writing is called exotic or avant-garde because I write about rural places. Has it really come to this, that if you write about the country you are avant-garde? How did this happen? Modern agriculture and spaces are still so relevant.

With historicals, the research is half the fun. Contemporaries are especially easy. People are right out there in front of you; you meet them every day. You can concentrate wholly on the story and characters.

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.

You are writing for your contemporaries - not for Posterity. If you are lucky, your contemporaries will become Posterity.

What we are trying to do now, this new generation of African writers, is to write about what it is to be a human being living in a particular African country. These are stories that resonate with anyone, anywhere.

I don't usually like teen novels written in the present tense, particularly those told from a first-person viewpoint. Too many writers seem to believe that using either or both devices automatically imbues their stories with deep seriousness and a contemporary feel.

I was always concerned with writing to my age at a particular moment. That was the way I would keep faith with the audience that supported me as I went along.

If you are a young writer today, it's very hard.

People say, 'You're like Dickens', but I'm not like Dickens. Zadie Smith is a Dickensian writer because she's writing about society now, just as Dickens was writing about his society.

I think some of the best modern writing comes now from travellers.