“We are now in the 21st century: all books, including the Koran, should be fair game for flushing down the toilet without fear of violent reprisal.” ShouldBookGamesCenturyFairsIncludingViolent21st CenturyToiletsFair GameReprisalFlushing Author:Sam Harris
“The death of the music business was insane, but audio recordings have been around now for maybe 120 years. Books have been around for, what, nine centuries? So they're more entrenched than music.” YearsHas BeensBookCenturyNineInsaneMusic BusinessAudioAudio Recording Author:Stephen King
“I think Twitter is the literature of the 21st century. I think it's an incredible art because when you make a book, you don't know who reads it. But every line, I write a million people, they read it, and then they insult me, they love me, they discuss, they give an opinion instantly, immediately. They are completely in communication, immediately. That is a real art.” PeopleThinkingKnowsGivingWritingArtBookRealLiteratureLinesOpinionMillionsCenturyCommunicationArt IsIncrediblesInsult21st Century Author:Alejandro Jodorowsky
“I try to find a style that matches the book. In the Baroque Cycle, I got infected with the prose style of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, which is my favorite era. It's recent enough that it is easy to read - easier than Elizabethan English - but it's pre-Victorian and so doesn't have the pomposity that is often a problem with 19th-century English prose. It is earthy and direct and frequently hilarious.” TryingBookEnoughProblemEasyCenturyStyleEasierLateDirectMy FavoriteErasProseCycles19th CenturyVictorian18th CenturyBaroqueElizabethanPomposity Author:Neal Stephenson
“For someone who loves literature, and all books on principle, being asked to name three titles over a half century of serious reading is akin to asking one to recall their three favorite sunsets.” BookThreeReadingLiteratureNamesHalfPrinciplesCenturySeriousAskingTitlesSunsetRecallsLove Literature Author:Thomas Steinbeck
“The Treatise of the Three Impostors is a book that enjoyed centuries of notorious nonexistence until (as Voltaire would say) it became necessary to invent it. Georges Minois writes with empathy, erudition, and a novelist's sense of buildup and timing, weaving in the parallel story of Europe's courageous freethinkers. In the face of today's social and even legal pressures against criticizing religion, it is good to see an honorable French tradition asserting itself.” WritingBookStoriesTodayFacesThreeSocialCenturyEmpathyEuropeTraditionPressureEnjoyedNovelistsCourageousCriticizeTimingHonorableParallelsFreethinkerWeavingNotoriousErudition Author:Joscelyn Godwin
“The instant you say All Quiet On The Western Front people remember that great 20th century classic book on war, a book about a school boy turned into a soldier overnight.” PeopleBookWarSchoolRememberBoysCenturyFrontsQuietWesternSoldierClassicInstant20th CenturyClassic Book Author:Ann Widdecombe
“The most powerful words in English are 'Tell me a story,' words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself. I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mean I had to like that trend or go along with it. I fight against these movements with every book I write.” WritingMeanDoeArtBookStoriesFormHumanityFightingLostLanguageBornPowerfulNovelCenturyMovementPaintingSpeciesRelatedComplexityMost PowerfulTrendsRhymeContinuitySingularityPowerful Words Author:Pat Conroy
“I have been interested in the 12th century since my 20s when it was very fashionable to say of anybody with whom you disagreed, which was basically anybody over the age of 30, "One of the great minds of the 12th century", and one day I thought, "I don't know anything about the 12 century." So I started buying books, reading about it, and I discovered it was a period of great flowering, it was a Renaissance before what we think is the Renaissance, the Italian Renaissance of the 16th century.” ThinkingKnowsMindHas BeensBookAgeReadingCenturyPeriodsOne DayBuyingItalianFashionableBook ReadingRenaissanceFloweringGreat MindsItalian RenaissanceBuying Books Author:Yitzhak Rabin
“Some men look at Constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them, like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well; I belonged to and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present; and forty years of experience in Government is worth a century of book-reading; and this they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead.” MenYearsHumansWellsLooksBookCountryGovernmentAgeReadingCenturyHe ManConstitutionSacredTouchedFortyReverenceAmendmentsBook ReadingCovenantArkYears Of ExperienceSanctimonious Author:Thomas Jefferson
“My teacher introduced me to this photographer Eugène Atget. He was a French photographer in the late 1800s up until 1927 in Paris. He didn't consider himself an artist, but he was probably one of the artists of the 20th century. This guy documented all of Paris during those years. It's unbelievable. The books are phenomenal. The Museum of Modern Art has all his stuff now and [American photographer] Berenice Abbott saved his work. Not very much is known about his life, but the work is unreal and it totally spoke to me. He was the only artist for a number of years that I cared about at all.” YearsArtBookArtistGuyStuffNumbersKnownTeacherModernCenturyLatePhotographerSavedParisSpokesMuseums20th CenturyUnbelievableThis GuyUnrealPhenomenalModern Art Author:Jeff Vespa
“It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy.” BookCountryPhilosophyFateMiddleCenturyRealizationTwentieth CenturyIntricateEuropean Countries Author:Czeslaw Milosz
“The very quality of books to read and facts to master with which the twentieth-century man is confronted encourages him to think broadly and superficially about much, but hinders him from thinking deeply and thoroughly about anything.” ThinkingMenBookFactsQualityCenturyMastersTwentieth CenturyHinderThinking Deeply Author:J. I. Packer
“I've carried on, in that same tradition, with my kids. Aside from just his brilliance, in my estimation, I think he had one of the great imaginations of the 20th century. One of the reasons why the tradition carries on, all these years later, is because, as a parent, those are the books that you go to and pull off the shelf because they never stop delighting you.” ThinkingYearsBookReasonKidsParentImaginationCenturyTraditionReason WhyCarrieShelves20th CenturyBrillianceEstimationGreat Imagination Author:Christopher Meledandri
“As Commander-in-Chief, I take pleasure in commending the reading of the Bible to all who serve in the Armed Forces of the United States. Throughout the centuries, men of many faiths and diverse origins have found in the Sacred Book words of wisdom, counsel, and inspiration. It is a fountain of strength...an aid in attaining the highest aspiration of the human soul.” MenHumansBookSoulStatesInspirationReadingFoundForcePleasureUnitedUnited StatesCenturyWords Of WisdomHighestSacredAidsChiefsAspirationDiverseFountainHuman SoulCommandersArmed ForcesCommander In Chief Author:Franklin D. Roosevelt
“I always wanted to write a book about LA, a big ambitious book. Nobody had ever really done it with LA- treating the city seriously as a major economic and cultural power, as the embodiment of 21st century America.” WritingBookDoneBigsWantedAmericaCitiesEconomicCenturyMajorsAmbitious21st CenturyEmbodiment Author:James Frey
“With a book tucked in one hand, and a computer shoved under my elbow, I will march, not sidle, shudder or quake, into the twenty-first century.” FirstsBookHandsCenturyComputerTwentiesMarchElbowsQuake Author:Ray Bradbury
“To live with the work and the letters of James Joyce was an enormous privilege and a daunting education. Yes, I came to admire Joyce even more because he never ceased working, those words and the transubstantiation of words obsessed him. He was a broken man at the end of his life, unaware that Ulysses would be the number one book of the twentieth century and, for that matter, the twenty-first.” MenFirstsBookEndsMatterWould BeNumbersCenturyBrokenLettersTwentiesPrivilegeEnormousAdmireObsessedTwentieth CenturyJoyceUlyssesBroken ManTransubstantiation Author:Edna O'Brien
“There were a hundred booksellers in the old round city founded by the eighth-century caliph al-Mansur. The café and wine-drinking culture of Baghdad has been famous for centuries; there was a whole school of Iraqi poets who wrote poems about the wine bars of medieval Baghdad - the khamriyaat, or wine songs, that I quote in the book.” Has BeensBookWholeSchoolSongCultureCitiesCenturyPoetHundredWineDrinkingRoundsBarsAlsMedievalBaghdadDrinking WineCaliphsBooksellers Author:Annia Ciezadlo
“Although the stories are very present in my book, and very present in my mind, what I was most interested in was the question of why it had attracted such a following in the 18th Century. It's less mysterious that it attracted a following in the Romantic period, and in the 19th Century, but the early 18th Century when the Rationalists fell in love with it...that was mysterious. What I wanted to look at was the forms of enchantment.” MindLooksBookStoriesWantedFormCenturyPeriodsFollowingMysterious19th CenturyEnchantment18th Century Author:Marina Warner
“I wanted to be an artist after all, and my teachers told me these were the best authors the 20th century had to offer. But these books sucked. They were so boring and sloppy and plotless. And Bob Dylan's lyrics seemed nonsensical to me - almost like he had just gotten high and written down whatever random thoughts occurred to him.” BookWantedArtistTeacherWrittenCenturyOffersBoringBob20th CenturyDylanSloppyNonsensicalSo BoringRandom Thoughts Author:Simon Rich
“Mainstream rabbis essentially closed the book on dreams by the sixth century, and Church fathers established that only certain saints have the discernment to determine which dreams are from God. The dream is exiled.” BookDreamCertainFatherChurchCenturySaintDetermineMainstreamDiscernmentRabbiChurch Fathers Author:Rodger Kamenetz
“After I finished the Tycoons - on post-Civil War development - I realized how much I didn't know about the first half of the century, even though there had obviously been an enormous amount of development, so I read about and thought about that for a couple of years before I decided I was ready for a book.” KnowsYearsFirstsBookWarHalfCenturyReadyDevelopmentAmountCoupleDecidedFinishedI RealizedEnormousPostsCivil WarTycoons Author:Charles R. Morris
“I was in school for literature, and read so many 19th century and early 20th century novels that it was hard to break out of that and read an average Jeanette Winterson book or something.” BookHardSchoolLiteratureBreakNovelCenturyAverage20th Century19th CenturyBreak Out Author:Colin Meloy
“I would be researching seventeenth-century garden design or I would be doing something with Pepys, but I just kept using all of it to write about Margaret Cavendish. It took me a long time to realize that I just wanted to write a book about her. Years.” WritingYearsLongBookWould BeWantedRealizingCenturyDesignLong TimeGardenGarden Design Author:Danielle Dutton