A Quote by Noam Chomsky

I just don't care about popular culture. It looks to me pointless and superficial. If I had free time I'd rather read a 19th century novel.

Noam Chomsky

Quote Topics

About Care Century Culture Don't Care Free Free Time Had Just Looks Me Novel Pointless Popular Popular Culture Rather Read Superficial Time

Quote Author

Noam Chomsky
American - Activist
Born: December 7, 1928

The Anglo-American tradition is much more linear than the European tradition. If you think about writers like Borges, Calvino, Perec or Marquez, they're not bound in the same sort of way. They don't come out of the classic 19th-century novel, which is where all the problems start. 19th-century novels are fabulous and we should all read them, but we shouldn't write them.

Jeanette Winterson

Nantucket was a Quaker-based culture, so they were not readers. There's a great Nantucket-based novel from the 19th century that Melville read for his research for 'Moby-Dick': 'Miriam Coffin' by Joseph Hart.

Nathaniel Philbrick

What I'm definitely against is the plodding, paint-by-numbers 19th-century-style novel that's still being written today. I just don't understand why you'd read or write that in 2011.

David Shields

People have asked me about the 19th century and how I knew so much about it. And the fact is I really grew up in the 19th century, because North Carolina in the 1950s, the early years of my childhood, was exactly synchronous with North Carolina in the 1850s. And I used every scrap of knowledge that I had.

Allan Gurganus

I've always been a fan of the 19th century novel, of the novel that is plotted, character-driven, and where the passage of time is almost as central to the novel as a major minor character, the passage of time and its effect on the characters in the story.

John Irving

Its highest point was The Worst Journey in the World. Then you see this decline, and this harking back, using the 19th-century form when we're not in the 19th century. That way of writing a book about the world out there - you just can't do it anymore.

Robyn Davidson

I had never read Victorian novels before going overseas. I read a handful of authors, but I had not immersed myself in the literature of the 19th century.

Eleanor Catton

One dictionary that I consulted remarks that "natural history" now commonly means the study of animals and plants "in a popular and superficial way," meaning popular and superficial to be equally damning adjectives. This is related to the current tendency in the biological sciences to label every subdivision of science with a name derived from the Greek. "Ecology" is erudite and profound; while "natural history" is popular and superficial. Though, as far as I can see, both labels apply to just about the same package of goods.

Marston Bates

You only had widespread literacy and books that people could afford in the middle of the 19th century. Did more people read poetry at the turn of the 20th century when there were about fifty million people?

Robert Hass

Well, the first thing I had to do was to read a lot. First of all, about education... and looking at education from the Middle Ages right through to the 20th Century. The second major area was country life in the 19th Century, which I don't know much about these days.

Michael Haneke

If Bush had read all the documents about the Russians and British in Afghanistan in the 19th century, he would have not done what he did in the 21st. He would have understood how difficult it was to control this territory. He probably didn't read them.

Umberto Eco

If you're looking for a book that's not been influenced by 21st century popular culture and that's guaranteed to be a good read because it's stood the test of time, you can't go wrong with the classics.

Cecilia Dart-Thornton

In the beginning of the 19th century, maybe forty percent of women and fifty percent of men could produce a signature, which meant that they'd had at least three years of education because it was in third grade that people started penmanship in the 19th century. And of course black people could get killed if they got caught teaching themselves to read in some parts of the country.

Robert Hass

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

I was really interested in 20th century communalism and alternative communities, the boom of communes in the 60s and 70s. That led me back to the 19th century. I was shocked to find what I would describe as far more utopian ideas in the 19th century than in the 20th century. Not only were the ideas so extreme, but surprising people were adopting them.