Theme Quotes - Page 20

• If you write fiction you are, in a sense, corrupted. There's a tremendous corruptibility for the fiction writer because you're dealing mainly with sex and violence. These remain the basic themes, they're the basic themes of Shakespeare whether you like it or not.

  Anthony Burgess

  Sex, Writing, Fiction

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• America is the world's living myth. There's no sense of wrong when you kill an American or blame America for some local disaster. This is our function, to be character types, to embody recurring themes that people can use to comfort themselves, justify themselves and so on. We're here to accommodate. Whatever people need, we provide. A myth is a useful thing.

  Don DeLillo

  Character, America, People

  Don DeLillo (2012). “The Names”, p.114, Vintage

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• It is very much the theme of our President, President Thabo Mbeki, whose passion is for Africa to work together, and for Africans to get up and do things for us. We are trying as women to do things for ourselves.

  Miriam Makeba

  Passion, Working Together, Trying

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• Adjustment, that synonym for conformity that comes more easily to the modern tongue, is the theme of our swan song, the piper's tune to which we dance on the brink of the abyss, the siren's melody that destroys our senses and paralyzes our wills.

  Robert M. Lindner

  Song, Swans, Tongue

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• New earths, new themes expect us.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Land, Earth, New Earth

  Henry David Thoreau, Odell Shepard (1961). “The Heart of Thoreau's Journals”, p.185, Courier Corporation

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• Illusion - or rather appearance, semblance - is the theme of my life (could be theme of speech welcoming freshmen to the Academy). All that is, seems, and is visible to us because we perceive it by the reflected light of semblance. Nothing else is visible.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Light, Speech

  Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009). “Gerhard Richter: text : writings, interviews and letters, 1961-2007”

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• Some writers find that they don't know their themes until they've finished the first draft (I am one). They then rewrite with an eye toward balancing on that tightrope: not too contrived, not too rambling; does what I'm saying about the world below me actually add up to anything? Other writers pay attention to these things as they write the first draft. Either way, an awareness of the macro and micro levels of theme can provide one more tool for thinking about what you should write, and how.

  Nancy Kress

  Eye, Writing, Thinking

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• The first thing I learned was the theme from Peter Gunn.

  Pat Metheny

  Firsts, Peter

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• The theme is the theme of humiliation, which is the square root of sin, as opposed to the freedom from humiliation, and love, which is the square root of wonderful.

  Carson McCullers

  Squares, Roots, And Love

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• The AIDS epidemic has rolled back a big rotting log and revealed all the squirming life underneath it, since it involves, all at once, the main themes of our existence: sex, death, power, money, love, hate, disease and panic. No American phenomenon has been so compelling since the Vietnam War.

  Edmund White

  Sex, Hate, War

  States of Desire: Travels in Gay America "Afterword - AIDS: An American Epidemic" (1986)

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• I don't want to deal with big, grand themes in my stories; art has nothing to do with themes. When you deal with themes, you are not creating; you are lecturing.

  Tatyana Tolstaya

  Art, Creating, Stories

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• There is a common theme, though, in the stories I have told, which are usually associations of characters or families that are formed outside of a family circle.

  Gus Van Sant

  Family, Character, Circles

  "EXCLUSIVE: Gus Van Sant Talks Restless Blu-ray" by B.Alan Orange, movieweb.com. January 25, 2012.

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• I hear filmmakers saying, 'I wanted to make to make a film about this issue, or this theme,' but I never start like that.

  Andrea Arnold

  Issues, Film, Wanted

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• Beginning writers are often advised to 'write what you know,' and since I knew about quilters - their quirks, their inside jokes, their disputes and their generosity, their quarrels and their kindnesses - the lives of quilters became a natural subject for me. Quilting wove together my two themes as completely and effortlessly as I could have hoped.

  Jennifer Chiaverini

  Kindness, Writing, Two

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• A lot of the themes of my movies, the actual stories, come from tabloid stories.

  Errol Morris

  Movie, Stories, Tabloids

  "Errol Morris: 'The Thin Blue Line' would not have saved Randall Adams today" by Eric Kohn, www.indiewire.com. July 13, 2011.

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• I began to write a kind of waltz and in a little more than an hour I had the theme written.

  Maurice Jarre

  Writing, Littles, Kind

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• Themes recur again and again in my work.

  Eve Arnold

  Again And Again

  Eve Arnold (1976). “The Unretouched Woman”, Random House (NY)

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• We all perform our lives in a way. And the actor is a perfect metaphor to get at that theme of "how do we find our authentic selves?" And that we all - whether we're actors or not - perform ourselves. As a way of searching. As a way of fumbling around and trying to say, is this my voice? Is this who I am?

  Annette Bening

  Voice, Self, Who I Am

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• I knew I wanted to write on religious themes when I was a GI in World War II. I saw and experienced so much violence that I thought I could express my outrage best with music.

  Dave Brubeck

  Religious, War, Writing

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• I don't really do themes. I might accidentally, but themes are an emergent phenomena of the writing of the book, of just trying to get a story out there.

  Iain Banks

  Book, Writing, Trying

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• To me I think artists in general make a statement - and for the rest of their lives - every album, every book - are variations on a theme.

  Mark Mothersbaugh

  Book, Artist, Thinking

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• If it awakens in us as a whole how important that is - the theme of how conquest and ambition are meaningless without contribution - I think then as a society we're in better shape. I hope people are inspired to be the best.

  Rob Morrow

  Ambition, Thinking, People

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• When I'm creating characters, I definitely think of theme songs. Writing for me is very visual, so I sometimes think of it in terms of a movie with a soundtrack, and try to transfer that to words.

  Marisha Pessl

  Song, Writing, Character

  "Random Rules: Marisha Pessl" by Andy Battaglia, www.avclub.com. November 14, 2006.

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• The story is the only thing that's important. Everything else will take care of itself. It's like what bowlers say. You hear writers talk about character or theme or mood or mode or tense or person. But bowlers say, if you make the spares, the strikes will take care of themselves. If you can tell a story, everything else becomes possible. But without story, nothing is possible, because nobody wants to hear about your sensitive characters if there's nothing happening in the story. And the same is true with mood. Story is the only thing that's important.

  Stephen King

  Character, Writing, Important

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• The one theme of the Vedanta philosophy is the search after unity. The Hindu mind does not care for the particular; it is always after the general, nay, the universal. "what is it that by knowing which everything else is to be known." That is the one search.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Philosophy, Knowing, Unity

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