Quotes & Sayings About 20th Century Literature

I still believe nonfiction is the most important literature to come out of the second half of the 20th century. — Tom Wolfe

After reading Edgar Allan Poe. Something the critics have not noticed: a new literary world pointing to the literature of the 20th Century. Scientific miracles, fables on the pattern A+ B, a clear-sighted, sickly literature. No more poetry but analytic fantasy. Something monomaniacal. Things playing a more important part than people; love giving away to deductions and other forms of ideas, style, subject and interest. The basis of the novel transferred from the heart to the head, from the passion to the idea, from the drama to the denouement. — Jules De Goncourt

The 20th century is a period defined by cultural and artistic movements. However, the 21st century creative-scape that we occupy now doesn't really have movements in the same way. Instead it's made up of diverse individuals working across various platforms simultaneously; art, architecture, film, music and literature. — Doug Aitken

The force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century. — Daniel J. Boorstin

I do think that our perception of reality is fragmentary, and in 20th-century literature, it's totally normal to not describe reality as something whole and completely transportable and explicable. That's been accepted in novels. But genre films always pretend that reality is transportable, which means that it is explicable. — Michael Haneke

Based on theoretical analysis, clinical observations, and some research findings, as well as on 19th and early 20th century literature on dissociation, we propose that traumatization essentially involves a degree of dissociative division of the personality that likely occurs along the lines of innate action systems of daily life and defense - what has been called structural dissociation of the personality. Dissociation of the personality develops when children or adults are exposed to potentially traumatizing events, and when their integrative capacity is insufficient to (fully) integrate these experiences within the confines of a relatively coherent personality. — Onno Van Der Hart

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. — Colin Meloy

Certainty. Life's last and kindest gift. — Milan Kundera

Mention the gothic, and many readers will probably picture gloomy castles and an assortment of sinister Victoriana. However, the truth is that the gothic genre has continued to flourish and evolve since the days of Bram Stoker, producing some of its most interesting and accomplished examples in the 20th century - in literature, film and beyond. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century. — J.G. Ballard

A stubborn refusal of the conditions of 20th Century 'reality', surrealism has denied intransigently and consistently that modern man can live without a sense of wonder at the world that was once embodied in myth. In approaching literature, it has aimed at restoring to the word its magical qualities. And at giving back to language the elemental power it once had within society. This determinism lies at the heart of the surrealist attitude and distinguishes it radically from the modernism which took shape contemporaneously with it. — Michael Richardson

An interesting thing about New Zealand, you know, literature is that it really didn't begin in any real sense until the 20th century. — Eleanor Catton