Theme Quotes - Page 21

• Art is built on the deepest themes of human meaning: good and evil, beauty and ugliness, life and death, love and hate. No other story has incarnated those themes more than the story of Jesus.

  John Ortberg

  Art, Jesus, Hate

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• The most difficult part of any crime novel is the plotting. It all begins simply enough, but soon you're dealing with a multitude of linked characters, strands, themes and red herrings - and you need to try to control these unruly elements and weave them into a pattern.

  Ian Rankin

  Character, Crime Novels, Trying

  "Paperback Q&A: Ian Rankin on The Impossible Dead". www.theguardian.com. May 22, 2012.

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• If you look at music, you see theme, variation, you see symmetry, asymmetry, you see structure, and these are related to skills in the real world.

  Dave Van Ronk

  Real, Skills, Asymmetry

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• The weak economy, widening income inequality, gridlock in Congress and a presidential election: Those were perhaps the dominant economic and political themes of 2012.

  Steven Rattner

  Economic Inequality, Presidential, Political

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• If there is one abiding theme in the gym, it's the withering work in the ring. Those not fit do not survive.

  Emanuel Steward

  Strength, Sports, Fitness

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• Of course, losing my father was traumatic. I was an only child. But from the time my father died, my general theme in life has been to turn adversity into opportunity.

  Thomas G. Stemberg

  Children, Father, Adversity

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• A very powerful theme in fiction is that of loss.

  Alexander McCall Smith

  Powerful, Loss, Fiction

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• To this day I over prepare. I draw storyboards for every scene - chicken scratches so crude that they amuse and horrify the crew. I send out shot lists, act out the scenes, and search for a theme that I can relate to. It's my favorite time of the process.

  Eric Stoltz

  Scratches, Lists, My Favorite

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• Stories, as much as we like to talk about them, retrospectively, as emanations of theme or worldview or intention, occur primarily as technical objects when they're being written. Or at least they do for me. They're the result of thousands of decisions made at speed during revision.

  George Saunders

  Decision, Stories, Revision

  "On 'Tenth of December': an interview with George Saunders". Interview with Deborah Treisman, www.newyorker.com. January 24, 2013.

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• We need a candidate who's going to be a fighter for freedom. Who is going to get up and make that the central theme in this race because it is the central theme in this race. I don't care what the unemployment rate's going to be. Doesn't matter to me. My campaign doesn't hinge on unemployment rates and growth rates.

  Rick Santorum

  Race, Growth, Needs

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• But once an original book has been written - and no more than one or two appear in a century - men of letters imitate it, in other words, they copy it so that hundreds of thousands of books are published on exactly the same theme, with slightly different titles and modified phraseology. This should be able to be achieved by apes, who are essentially imitators, provided, of course, that they are able to make use of language.

  Pierre Boulle

  Book, Writing, Men

  Pierre Boulle (1963). “Planet of the Apes”

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• The vast majority of beings who incarnate on this planet are at the stage of their evolution where power is the dominant theme. They are learning about power. That is why we live in a world where there are so many wars and so much destruction.

  Frederick Lenz

  War, Buddhism, Humanity

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• Write about small, self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory. If you remember them, it's because they contain a larger truth that your readers will recognize in their own lives. Think small and you'll wind up finding the big themes in your family saga.

  William Zinsser

  Memories, Writing, Thinking

  William Zinsser (2005). “Writing about Your Life: A Journey Into the Past”, p.7, Da Capo Press

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• I feel that discussing story-writing in terms of plot, character, and theme is like trying to describe the expression on a face by saying where the eyes, nose, and mouth are.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Character, Eye, Writing

  Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.89, Macmillan

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• Back in the day you wanted your albums to have a theme, and 'Sports' theme was really a collection of singles. It was really a record for its time.

  Huey Lewis

  Sports, Albums, Records

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• I love theme parks but I'm a real chicken on rides. I'd rather invent scary rides for my books than go on them for real.

  R. L. Stine

  Real, Book, Scary

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

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• My boyfriend and I just got a projector, so we've been screening movies on the roof and projecting them against the wall next door. The last one we did, the theme was, "The Russians are Coming". So we screened Red Dawn and Top Gun.

  Olivia Thirlby

  Wall, Gun, Doors

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

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• Along the way I have been able to choose some themes which ask questions - not necessarily force a message on anyone, but at least invite the audience to question things: jury service, dignity in dying, Ireland - and not least because they force me to ask myself questions. Where do I stand?

  Julie Walters

  Dying, Able, Way

  "Bafta TV special/Julie Walters: Queen of the screen". Interview with Euan Ferguson, www.theguardian.com. May 19, 2012.

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• I would say my theme has always been paradise lost, always the lost cause, the lost leader, the lost utopia.

  Marguerite Young

  Leader, Causes, Paradise

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• Admittedly, the masturbation story is just a "Hey, this is one of my best-of's, I'll throw it in the special." But the grandmother stuff, really, I feel like is part of the theme and part of the best way to end the story that I'm telling with the special.

  Jen Kirkman

  Grandmother, Special, Stories

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• The fourth paradigm forces us at every point to discern between the creationally valid and the sinfully perverse and thus confronts us with a never-ending task which requires not only competence but also spiritual discernment. Yet this is precisely the task which we must assume, even at the risk of being vague on specifics. The alternative is to compromise basic themes of authentic Christianity.

  Albert M. Wolters

  Spiritual, Risk, Tasks

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• On the stage . . . masks are assumed with some regard to procedure; in everyday life, the participants act their parts without consideration either for suitability of scene or for the words spoken by the rest of the cast: the result is a general tendency for things to be brought to the level of farce even when the theme is serious enough.

  Anthony Powell

  Life, Everyday, Farce

  Anthony Powell (2010). “A Question of Upbringing: Book 1 of A Dance to the Music of Time”, p.51, University of Chicago Press

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• The whole thing about making films in an organic film on location is that it's not all about characters, relationships and themes, it's also about place and the poetry of place. It's about the spirit of what you find, the accidents of what you stumble across.

  Mike Leigh

  Character, Location, Spirit

  "Mike Leigh at the NFT". Interview with Derek Malcolm, www.theguardian.com. October 7, 2002.

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• But conversation, choose what theme we may,
  And chiefly when religion leads the way,
  Should flow, like waters after summer show'rs,
  Not as if raised by mere mechanic powers.

  William Cowper

  Summer, Water, May

  William Cowper, “Conversation”

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• My models, my human figures, are never like extras in an interior. They are the main theme of my work. I depend absolutely on my model.

  Henri Matisse

  Figures, Extras, Models

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