What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it. Dull to the contemporary who reads it and invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it.
As a nation we have the right to decide our own affairs, to mould our own future. This does not pose any danger to anybody. Our nation is fully aware of the responsibility for its own fate in the complicated situation of the contemporary world.
I really don't take any interest at all in contemporary comedy.
Our goal at Home Theater Films is to inspire and entertain our audience. We want to make great movies that everyone can enjoy and elevate them with contemporary, relatable characters that naturally demonstrate their faith in real world situations.
Popular culture isn't a freeze-frame; it is images zapping by in rapid-fire succession, which is why collage is such an effective way of representing contemporary life. The blur between images creates a kind of motion in the mind.
I love and collect contemporary art and go to all the art fairs. I love Damien Hirst and Matthew Barney. I grew up in Italy and had a humanistic education in philosophy and literature - things I love and appreciate. People are richer and more complex than just their day-to-day professional pursuits might suggest.
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 music that I've made in the past has had strong contemporary country roots, but I think moving on in music, I will branch out from that a bit.
The self-image of many contemporary sportswriters seems to depend on maintaining that were it not for sports, athletes would be pumping gas, if they were not sticking up the gas station.
Even the contemporary horror authors who have seriously influenced me are a disparate bunch.
I never paid attention to what was contemporary or what was commercial, it didn't mean anything to me.
I'm a contemporary playwright in a postmodern world.
I have learned to interface - what I think would be the contemporary term - with various different lexicons, and people speak very different languages. I've learned to speak in a lot of tongues, and I can live with the bellicose language of some fervent, fire-breathing Christians, sure.
Take Damien Hirst out of contemporary art history, and there's an incredible void. Great artists, like great people, have second acts.
My parents were very, very close; they pretty much grew up together. They were born in 1912. They were each other's only boyfriend and girlfriend. They were - to use a contemporary term I hate - co-dependent, and they had me very late. So they had their way of doing things, and they reinforced each other.
Ever since my youth it has disturbed me that of the literary works that survived their own epoch, so many dealt with historical rather than contemporary subjects.
Roberto Cavalli is a great designer. The Just Cavalli brand is very sexy, young and cool. Each collection is very contemporary and colourful; it is clearly for the younger generation who wants to have a trendy look. It's the first fragrance that I have ever done, so it's a huge honour!
'Mad Men' doesn't capture one single thing about the decor, costumes, or sexual interaction. It is a total projection of contemporary snarky attitudes into the past.
The British and American literary worlds operate in an odd kind of symbiosis: our critics think our contemporary novelists are not the stuff of greatness whereas certain contemporary Americans indubitably are. Their critics often advance the exact opposite: British fiction is cool, American naff.
But, in the end, even a song that's as politically bland as Blowin in the Wind, you probably wouldn't get up and sing that now, whereas some of Bob Dylan's love songs that were contemporary with that, like say Girl from the North Country, you can still get up an play now.
You cannot simply put something new into a place. You have to absorb what you see around you, what exists on the land, and then use that knowledge along with contemporary thinking to interpret what you see.
Anyone reading contemporary poetry - especially contemporary African-American poetry - will quickly see that race is an enduring subject. What some don't realize is just how diverse the handling of that subject is. It's as diverse as blackness.
One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to that.
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.
I don't remember much about the specifics of the economics courses that I majored in - I apparently internalized the key concepts - but I still remember vividly the thrill of reading 'Don Quixote,' Epictetus, 'The Aeneid,' 'King Lear' and 'Candide,' and how contemporary the stories and ideas in these old and ancient texts struck me.
I grew up learning ballet, and then I took up contemporary as I got older. I probably thought I was going to be a ballet dancer when I was younger, but at a certain age, I really was more interested in acting.
There's no such thing as the contemporary novel. Before I seem the complete reactionary, let me add that I've happily joined in many discussions about 'the contemporary novel' where what that usually, unproblematically means is novels that have appeared recently or may appear soon.
FKA Twigs is stunning. She has beautiful contemporary and unique sound with an almost psychedelic vibe. Her music is great for the runway.
The writers who inspire me most are all women: Enid Blyton, Agatha Christie, Margaret Mitchell and Emily and Charlotte Bronte. As for contemporary novels, one of my favourites is 'Everyone Brave is Forgiven' by Chris Cleave. It's the sort of book to read if you've fallen out of love with reading - it reminds you just how brilliant novels can be.
I review books as a day job, and through the years I've come to view the contemporary memoir as, almost always, a saga of victimization, sometimes by others, sometimes by the self, and sometimes by illness or misfortune, leading, like clockwork, to healing and redemption.
An obituary should be an exercise in contemporary history, not a funeral oration.
'Confederate,' in all of our minds, will be an alternative-history show. It's a science-fiction show. One of the strengths of science fiction is that it can show us how this history is still with us in a way no strictly realistic drama ever could, whether it were a historical drama or a contemporary drama.
The Pakistani writers are addressing change and what's happening today in the world. There is something completely contemporary in this writing.
I wrote 'Don't Look Back' in November 2011, and when I wrote the novel, it wasn't contracted, so there was a freedom in that - no expectations or anything like that. It was also my first contemporary novel I'd written and sold, which was to Disney/Hyperion in January of 2012.
I'm not doing contemporary songs unless something comes along that really knocks my socks off.
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.