Modern Style Quotes & Sayings

Classic burlesque in the style of Gypsy which many modern burlesque troupes practice is, at its core, so playful and teasing and innocent. It's not hardcore stripping so much as letting your body tell a story; the women are playing characters and unfolding a complete narrative onstage, with beginning, middle, and end. — Karen Abbott

Strunk was born in 1869, and today's writers cannot base their craft exclusively on the advice of a man who developed his sense of style before the invention of the telephone (let alone the Internet), before the advent of modern linguistics and cognitive science, before the wave of informalization that swept the world in the second half of the twentieth century. — Steven Pinker

Henry Gerber, writing in 1932 under the pseudonym Parisex, responded to an article in The Modern Thinker that condemned homosexuality. "Is not the psychiatrist again putting the cart before the horse in saying that homosexuality is a symptom of the neurotic style of life?" he insisted. "Would it not sound more natural to say that the homosexual is made neurotic because his style of life is beset by thousands of dangers? — George Chauncey

Unity transcends time, style, and numbers. When people hold hands across their own theologies, that unity can bring down the modern-day walls of Jericho. — Martin Smith

The evolution of the capitalist style of life could be easily - and perhaps most tellingly - described in terms of the genesis of the modern Lounge Suit. — Joseph A. Schumpeter

The fact that I made a special movie with an old-fashioned style - even if it's a mix between with modern and old-fashioned things - must mean I feel both ways about change. In a way I'm resisting, but in a way adapting myself to the times. — Michel Hazanavicius

Sergio Trujillos choreography adds coals to the inferno, with movement that plain just doesnt stop. We know from Jersey Boys that he can capture this style, but in Memphis, he kicks it up towards art, playing with the authentic touches to add some hits of Fosse, or riffs from modern dance that take us just that extra step we need. — Richard Ouzounian

I read mostly Irish, African, Japanese, South American, and African writers. You can count on Scandinavian literature for a certain kind of darkness, a modern mythic style. — Chris Abani

It is impossible to approve in Catholic publications of a style inspired by unsound novelty which seems to deride the piety of the faithful and dwells on the introduction of a new order of Christian life, on new directions of the Church, on new aspirations of the modern soul, on a new vocation of the clergy, on a new Christian civilisation. — Pope Pius X

In modern novels, there is no one I want to copy. My style 'is a poor thing, but it is my own.' — Jane Gardam

I really tried to push every genre that I could into this record. I wanted every song to have this feel, where as soon as the listener tunes in, they say "That's CoJo, that's Cody right there." That being said, it is a little different. There's Americana, there's Bluegrass, there's some rock, there's some really George Jones-style stuff on it, slow-style Ray Price country elements, there's some modern country, a little of this and a little of that. We tried to push a lot for show versatility, because I grew up with a lot of versatility in my music. — Cody Johnson

Modern architecture is not a style, it's an attitude — Marcel Breuer

What the world wants, what the world is waiting for, is not Modern Poetry or Classical Poetry or Neo-Classical Poetry - but Good Poetry. And the dreadful disreputable doubt, which stirs in my own skeptical mind, is doubt about whether it would really matter much what style a poet chose to write in, in any period, as long as he wrote Good poetry. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

No, that's not the style of these people,' explained Maxy. 'You shouldn't think of these Bolsheviks as modern politicians. They were religious fanatics. Their Marxism was fanatical; their fervour was semi-Islamic; and they saw themselves as members of a secret military-religious order like the medieval Crusaders or the Knights Templar. They were ruthless, amoral and paranoid. They believed that millions would have to die to create their perfect world. Family, love and friendship were nothing compared to the holy grail. People died of gossip at Stalin's court. For a man like Satinov, secrecy was everything. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

I love Tate Modern; there's such great style and shopping here. I love the galleries and the pubs out on the street, just having your pint as the sun is setting. — Drew Barrymore

When I worked on a magazine, I learned that there are many, many writers writing that can't write at all; and they keep on writing all the cliches and bromides and 1890 plots, and poems about Spring and poems about Love, and poems they think are modern because they are done in slang or staccato style, or written with all the 'i's' small. — Charles Bukowski

IN THIS MODERN CENTURY ON MOTHER EARTH TIME HAS BEEN ALREADY RIPPED TO CONTEMPLATE ON MYTHOLOGICAL STYLE.TO DEODORIZE ,EXORCISE NANO MICRO LEVEL OF SANCTITY SHRIVE HOMEWORK OF ENTIRE GLOBAL HUMAN SAGACIOUS PENSIVE MENTAL PHILOSOPHY AND HEED STUNT. SO.LIKE OUR VENERABLE ANCIENT ENSHRINE SOULS ALREADY HAD ASCETICISM TO HOBNOB INTO DIVINISM.ALL GLOBAL CITIZENS HAVE TO DO EXECUTE DIFFERENT TYPE OF HOLY SANCROSANCT RELIGIOUS YAGNAS RIGHT NOW.TO CONSECRATED TO HIS EXCELLENCY UNIVERSAL BOSS GOD FOR THE PROSPERITY OF ALL CREATURES OF MEGA AND MACROCOSMOS TILL ELEVENTH HOUR OF ITS EXISTENCE. GOD BLESS YOU ALL. — Various

The only way to increase it is to cultivate your own garden. And the only thing that will help you is poetry, which is the most concentrated form of style ... I don't care how clever the other professor is, one can't raise a discussion of modern prose to anything above tea-table level. — F Scott Fitzgerald

I found the world of the Little House books to be so much less confusing, not just because it was "simpler," as plenty of people love to insist, but because it reconciled all the little contradictions of my modern girlhood. On the Banks of Plum Creek clicked with me especially, with its perfect combination of pinafores and recklessness. (I will direct your attention to the illustration on page 31 of my Plum Creek paperback, where you will note how fabulous Laura looks as she pokes the badger with a stick; her style is casual yet feminine, perfect for precarious nature adventures!) At an age when I found myself wanting both a Webelos uniform and a head of beautiful Superstar Barbie hair, On the Banks of Plum Creek was a reassuring book. Being a girl sometimes made more sense in Laura World than it did in real life. — Wendy McClure

Modern as the style of Pascal's writing is, his thought is deeply impregnated with the spirit of the Middle Ages. He belonged, almost equally, to the future and to the past. — Lytton Strachey

Most modern literary criticism is literary and nothing else - that is, it concentrates on an author's style and thinks it rather vulgar to notice his subject matter. — George Orwell

Hardboiled crime fiction came of age in 'Black Mask' magazine during the Twenties and Thirties. Writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler learnt their craft and developed a distinct literary style and attitude toward the modern world. — Charles Frazier

For my own style, I love vintage. 60's and 70's are my favorite. I love baby doll dresses and the soft colors. I try to mix a little bit of modern into that - maybe I'll wear it with boots. At my school we wear a uniform, but we have one day a week we can wear whatever we want. — Elle Fanning

And then Earl Scruggs comes along and transforms the banjo into a virtuosic modern instrument. For the first time, the Southern banjo style becomes the identity of the banjo, and everything from before is wiped off of people's consciousness by the power of that explosion. — Bela Fleck

The modern world is full of pundits, poseurs, and mall ninjas. Preparedness is not just about accumulating a pile of stuff. You need practical skills, and those come only with study, training, and practice. Any armchair survivalist with a credit card can buy a set of stylish camouflage fatigues and an "M4gery" carbine encrusted with umpteen accessories. Style points should not be mistaken for genuine skills and practicality. — James Wesley, Rawles

For me accessories create and define a woman's personal style. The bag she carries, the watch on her wrist, her jewelry, her sunglasses, her shoes all define a look that is her signature. For Spring 2014, my accessory collections are about a clean, graphic boldness creating a new dimension redefining modern classics. — Ralph Lauren

Apollinaire said a poet should be 'of his time.' I say objects of the Digital Age belong in newspapers, not literature. When I read a novel, I don't want credit cards; I want cash in ducats and gold doubloons. — Roman Payne

J.K. Rowling is a talented storyteller, but she has also used the style and technique of modern television and cinema media, which seizes the imagination by pummelling it, bombarding it with powerful stimuli, in a rapid pace, with plenty of emotional rewards. — Michael O'Brien

We've been to secretive, perhaps. For long periods in our shared history, that was a necessity born from conflict. But it is not, I am prepared to accept, a style of living compatible with the modern age. It is difficult to maintain trust that way. Even among friends. — Stephen Lloyd Jones

The truth is, Jung has brought back one member of the old duality, unreason, with a new name; it is no synthesis at all, but only the latest maneuver in the war against rationality that has been conducted with rising hysteria by literary intellectuals and humanists against the laws of a culture they have reason to distrust and disobey. The Jungian theory proposes to every disaffected humanist his "personal myth," as a sanctuary against the modern world. Against the vulgar democracy of intelligence, Jungian theory proposes an aristocracy of feeling. From this proposal derives Jung's persistent influence on modern critical and aesthetic style. — Philip Rieff

I want everyone to wear what they want and mix it in their own way. That, to me, is what is modern. — Karl Lagerfeld

All important architecture of the last century was strongly influenced by political systems. Look at the Soviet system, with its constructivism and Stalinism, Weimer with its Modern style, Mussolini and the Nazis and Albert Speer's colossal structures. Today's architecture is subservient to the market and its terms. The market has supplanted ideology. Architecture has turned into a spectacle. It has to package itself and no longer has significance as anything but a landmark. — Rem Koolhaas

But then no artist expects grace from the vulgar mind, or style from the suburban intellect. Vulgarity and stupidity are two very vivid facts in modern life. One regrets them, naturally. But there they are. — Oscar Wilde

If your like a powerful modern thriller with an historical core in the Scandinavian style of many separate threads which eventually come together, Purple Killing will grip you. It is my latest book and a companion to Hitler's First Lady, but in a very different style. Set equally in the US and UK. — Malcolm Blair-Robinson

The idea of recontextualizing images from different eras to express larger ideas about modern times was very exciting to me. That archival aesthetic is the foundation of my filmmaking style. — Elisa Kreisinger

Style is the most valuable asset of the modern artist. That's probably why so many styles are reported lost or stolen each year. — Brad Holland

To do justice to modern technology's rigid linear structure, to the lofty gridwork of cranes and bridges, to the dynamism of machines operating at one thousand horsepower - only photography is capable of that. What those who are attached to the painterly style regard as photography's defect, the mechanical reproduction of form - is just what makes it superior to all other means of expression. — Albert Renger-Patzsch

Copland was one of the first American composers to forge a truly modern style of American classical music while also making use of American popular music - including jazz. — Terry Teachout

Lionsgate and Lorenzo di Bonaventura saw my Korean Western-style film, 'The Good, the Bad, the Weird,' and probably felt that I would be right for 'The Last Stand,' which could be classified as a modern Western. — Kim Jee-woon

Impressionism was not just a style of painting, it was a new attitude to art and life; it is this attitude that marks the beginning of modern art. — Neville Weston

I work with structure, but I go outside the box and give it my own spin. I adore the challenge of creating truly modern clothes - where a woman's personality and sense of style are realized. — Vera Wang

I'd expected his style to be exotic and very different from modern dancing, but I hadn't expected that he would be doing a male version of belly dancing. — Colleen Houck

You basically have to play everything (in New Orleans), because you're getting calls to play gigs of all different styles, from classical to R&B to funk; modern jazz to traditional jazz. — Harry Connick Jr.

Billions of photos are shot every year, and about the toughest thing a photographer can do is invent an original, deeply personal, instantly recognizable visual style. In the early nineties, Wolfgang Tillmans did just that, transforming himself into a new kind of artist-photographer of modern life. — Jerry Saltz

A style of this sort will seem to modern readers marred by classical stiffness
"Truth," "Knowers," "the Good," "Man"
but we can by no means deny that behind our objection to such language is a guilty consciousness of the flimsiness, and not infrequently the trashiness, of our modern talk about "values. — Saul Bellow

That's one of the good things about a lot of the young British bands, they are mixing all styles of music. I think that's very good because that's very modern. — Mick Jagger

I don't see boundaries between styles, such as modern or contemporary. I've collected each piece from a different experience or period of my life. — Carlos Miele

Like Rousseau, Hegel appreciated quite early on that in modern commercial societies, individuals' desires and needs were generated by the desires and needs of others. Implanted by advertising, dictated by fashion, and determined by style, individual desire was always socially determined, shaped by the particular contexts in which we live. [..] Hence the need for greater comfort does not exactly arise within you directly; it is suggested to you by those who hope to make a profit from its creation. — Darrin M. McMahon

I created my bags from the notion of developing a well-edited line of fashionable, but not "trendy" handbags. By designing styles that will be as relevant tomorrow as they are today, my brand has established itself as a modern classic. — Kate Spade

On top of the good was a hideously ugly bronze statue in the modern style. The statue was of a couple, dressed in togas, wrapped in an embrace. Cupped in their hands was a piece of fruit. I couldn't be sure, because realism did not appear to be the artist's specialty, but it looked to me like a pomegranate.
"Good God," Frank, who'd trailed after us, said when he saw the statue. "Rector's even sicker than any of us thought. I've never wished I was blind before, like Graves, but I do now, because then I'd never have to look at that again."
"Frank," John said, his gaze on my face. "Be quiet."
"But what do they do in here?" Frank wanted to know. "Have picnics with their dead relatives and admire their ugly art? — Meg Cabot

In the fantasy I spun for myself that night before falling asleep, those deep dark secrets were revealed. That simple touch became a violent embrace, worthy of any bodice-ripper. There were a certain number of gleeful perversions committed on Ivan's battered leather sofa. And at some point in the fantasy, Ivan was a vampire, because I was sort of weird that way. He was a real, Gothic-style, Bram Stoker sort of vampire who bit people as a metaphor for having dubious-consent, alpha-male sex with them, I should point out. None of your modern, sensitive vampires for me. I appreciated the classics. — Delphine Dryden

What makes the prospect of death distinctive in the modern age is the background of permanent technological and sociological revolution against which it is set, and which serves to strip us of any possible faith in the permanence of our labours. Our ancestors could believe that their achievements had a chance of bearing up against the flow of events. We know time to be a hurricane. Our buildings, our sense of style, our ideas, all of these will soon enough be anachronisms, and the machines in which we now take inordinate pride will seem no less bathetic than Yorick's skull. — Alain De Botton

I intend more of a kinship with silent films than more modern film. I like the old cinema. My films are more of a hybrid - a different style of filmmaking to what I call talking head movies. Some people don't get it. Especially the more academic types. — George Lucas

Don't be afraid to mix things up by pairing a military-style jacket with a velvet skirt, vintage with modern, off-the-rack with couture, formal with casual. — Nina Garcia

The new Ann Taylor is for modern women who want to take on the world in style. — Demi Moore

There are ancient and modern poems which breathe, in their entirety and in every detail, the divine breath of irony. In such poemsthere lives a real transcendental buffoonery. Their interior is permeated by the mood which surveys everything and rises infinitely above everything limited, even above the poet's own art, virtue, and genius; and their exterior form by the histrionic style of an ordinary good Italian buffo. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

My style for the moment is modern mystic priestess. — Elisa Jimenez

He can develop sense and style, in the manner of distinguished modern prose, in which event he may be sure that the result will not fall into any objective form. — John Crowe Ransom

When you look on one of your contemporary 'good copies' of historical remains, ask yourself the question: Not what style, but in what civilization is this building? And the absurdity, vulgarity, anachronism and solecism of the modern structure will be revealed to you in a most startling fashion. — Louis Sullivan

We live in a modern world, and in contemporary music the central fact is contamination. Not the contamination of disease but the contamination of musical styles. If you find this in me, that is good. — Ennio Morricone

Our modern world, though infinitely more complex than that of ancient Greece, is also far more superficial. Where the Greeks offered simple psychological training, we live in an age of style and spin in which perceptions of good and evil slither and shift with the political view of the moment. — David Gemmell

In jargon nobody ever does anything, feels anything, or causes anything; nobody has an opinion. Opinions are had; causes result in; factors affect. Everything is reduced to vague abstraction. The writer can even abolish himself, for jargon never sounds as though anybody had written it; it seems simply to come about, as from a machine, and it talks mechanically of things that come about, through some indistinct interaction of forces." - Robert Waddell, "Formal Prose and Jargon," in Modern Essays on Writing and Style 84, 89 (Paul C. Wermuth ed., 1964). — Bryan A. Garner

Modern reformers offer nebulous theories or write philanthropic novels. But your thief acts! He is as clear as a fact and as logical as a punch on the nose! And what a style he has! — Honore De Balzac

I think that in France, we really admire American films, we admire their drive, we admire the modernity and ellipsism in the film and the writing and the style of acting, and we look at them perhaps in a way to see what we can steal from them, too, to make our own films more modern. — Francois Cluzet

Modern women are just bombarded. There's nothing but media telling us we're all supposed to be great cooks, have great style, be great in bed, be the best mothers, speak seven languages, and be able to understand derivatives. And we don't really have women we're modeling after, so we're all looking for how to do this. — Jamie Lee Curtis

On the white wall at the end of the room was a large oil painting of a European port, done in reds and yellows and blues. It was in slapdash modern style; the lady had painted it herself and signed it. She had given it pride of place in her main room. Yet she hadn't thought it worth the trouble of taking away. — V.S. Naipaul

Postmodernism came nowhere close in quality to Modernism at its apogee, not least because that later style wholly lacked the social impetus that animated the designs most emblematic of the Modern Movement. — Martin Filler

Your new kitchen should look like it was "born there." That doesn't mean it has to be the exact same style as the house. (You can put a modern kitchen into a Victorian, for example.) It just means that it has to complement the spaces around it. — Jamie Gold

Anybody who loves country music loves gospel. Even they are competing with the same type of problem that I'm competing with. We older artists are competing with the new style of country, with their new modern style of gospel, with the young people. — George Jones

Generally certain symptoms appear, among them a peculiar use of language: one wants to speak forcefully in order to impress one's opponent, so one employs a special, "bombastic" style full of neologisms which might be described as "power-words." This symptom is observable not only in the psychiatric clinic but also among certain modern philosophers, and, above all, whenever anything unworthy of belief has to be insisted on in the teeth of inner resistance: the language swells up, overreaches itself, sprouts grotesque words distinguished only by their needless complexity. The word is charged with the task of achieving what cannot be done by honest means. — C. G. Jung

[Louis Armstrong is] the father of us all, regardless of style or how modern we get. His influence is inescapable. Some of the things he was doing in the 20's and 30's, people still haven't dealt with. — Nicholas Payton

Everything you use in a modern life style has to be made using a tool of some sort. — Paul Harvey

The gothic is singular in this; one seems easily at home in the renaissance; one is not too strange in the Byzantine; as for the Roman, it is ourselves; and we could walk blindfolded through every chink and cranny of the Greek mind; all these styles seem modern when we come close to them; but the gothic gets away. — Henry Adams

It is my belief that there is a tendency among the so-called 'modern' or 'hip' jazz musicians to consider styles other that their own, 'corny', and it is my contention that in actuality it is these musicians who are producing that which in future years perceptive critics will deem 'corny'. — Don Ellis

I don't believe in texting while dining, sending one-word e-mails in lieu of formal thank-you cards, wearing shorts to the theater, or settling for any of the modern trends that favor comfort over politeness, ease over style. Manners are simply about asking yourself, What's the right thing to do? — Tim Gunn

Grace Kelly, Rita Hayworth and Sofia Lauren are my style inspirations. In terms of modern day actresses who I find inspiring, I love Emma Stone, Rooney Mara, Kirsten Dunst and Evan Rachel Wood. They aren't afraid to take risks and make edgy. — Carly Steel