Tropes Quotes

• I just watched so many Westerns as a kid that you end up using archetypes and sort of tropes of that genre, because there's a language there and you can twist it and turn it on its head or play to it or go sideways at any time.

  Gore Verbinski

  Kids, Play, Twists

  "Interview With Rango Director Gore Verbinski". Interview with Cindy White, www.ign.com. July 15, 2011.

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• For someone who is starting out on developing their critical skills, just being aware of its existence is great: it can make the difference between trying to write a story around a cliche or an original idea, and better still, studying it can eventually clue you in on how to breathe new life into tired tropes.

  Charles Stross

  Writing, Tired, Skills

  Reddit AMA, www.reddit.com. July 02, 2012.

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• I have written it before and am not ashamed to write it again. Without Wodehouse I am not sure that I would be a tenth of what I am today -- whatever that may be. In my teenage years, his writings awoke me to the possibilities of language. His rhythms, tropes, tricks and mannerisms are deep within me. But more than that, he taught me something about good nature. It is enough to be benign, to be gentle, to be funny, to be kind.

  Stephen Fry

  Teenage, Writing, Years

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• Some tropes are universal. Boy meets girl. Betrayal and revenge. The search to discover a hidden truth.... A mother's love isn't cliché, it's universal. These things are archetypes. They're the building blocks of myth and legend. They are a big part about what it means to be human.

  Patrick Rothfuss

  Girl, Mother, Revenge

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• What I like about narrative in general is when there is some incongruity between the form and content. Let's say, mixing up the gothic with a coming-of-age narrative. Telling a love story that's also a monster story. Mixing up superhero tropes with your monster tropes. I like category confusion.

  Kelly Link

  Confusion, Superhero, Age

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• Do proper homage to thine idol's eyes; But no too humbly, or she will despise Thee and thy suit, though told in moving tropes: Disguise even tenderness if thou art wise.

  Lord Byron

  Wise, Art, Moving

  Lord Byron (1854). “Childe Harold's pilgrimage”, p.84

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• I should probably confess that I get bored easily, which explains my reluctance to work with formula, tropes, whatever.

  Kit Reed

  Bored, Should, Reluctance

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• Moving cities are a fairly hoary old sci-fi trope - I seem to recall they were always cropping up on Doctor Who when I was young, though I may be misremembering.

  Philip Reeve

  Moving, Doctors, Cities

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• I have a great amount of respect for the audience. They know narrative construct. They know all the tropes.

  Paul Scheuring

  Narrative, Audience, Constructs

  "ZERO HOUR Executive Producers Paul Scheuring, Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Zack Estrin and Dan McDermott Talk About the New ABC Drama". Interview with Christina Radish, collider.com. February 14, 2013.

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• I love the of dealing with the homoerotic versus the idea of dealing with certain tropes with regards to black masculinity in the world, propensity towards sports, antisocial behavior, hypersexuality - all of these sort of non-truths that I don't exist in but that I see as being fixed in the world's imagination.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Sports, Ideas, Imagination

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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• One path I've used a lot is to deeply and thoughtfully consider a trope or a tradition, and then set about taking it apart - but only in the service of a character or story that deserves it. Another path I often employ is to put form into "play" - to set it free from its ordinary constraints and let it be free-floating and broken-apart and rearranged.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Character, Play, Broken

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I think we're always trying to avoid tropes. And I think that "Game of Thrones" has almost made killing people a cliche. For us, it wasn't about that. For six episodes, it's hard to invest in people, and I think when you kill a main character on television it really needs to mean something. So we certainly had talked about that, and I think we managed to juggle the ball to make a gripping, interesting and compelling finale. We feel that we didn't have to go there at this point because we had such few episodes.

  Miles Millar

  Character, Mean, Thinking

  Source: www.indiewire.com

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• It's fun playing the judge, because I grew up on all the courtroom stuff in movies and TV. So, you know all the tropes, and you know all the expressions.

  Doug Benson

  Fun, Expression, Judging

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• Self-reinvention is an essential trope of the American project, closely linked to another such trope: going on the lam. Both are regularly featured in movies and novels and suchlike. Criminals and persons loitering with and without intent hold a crucial place in the culture. For obvious reasons, the culture cannot endorse this behavior, even as it is in thrall to it.

  Luc Sante

  Self, Criminals, Essentials

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• Originally the premise of killing Hitler was fueled by deep traumatic feelings of wishing and fantasizing that if only things had been different, we could have spared ourselves all kinds of suffering. More recently it's been turned into a comedic trope. As we go forward, tragedy plus time equals comedy...

  Gavriel David Rosenfeld

  Feelings, Suffering, Tragedy

  "Back to the Führer: This Guy Studies Baby Hitler Time Machine Scenarios". Interview with Dave Glison, www.motherjones.com. October 23, 2015.

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• I think that young women and little girls need to see that they don't have to be the damsel in distress. They don't have to not show their strength. They don't have to be whatever the stereotype is or the tropes that we go to in our minds.

  Octavia Spencer

  Girl, Thinking, Mind

  "INSURGENT Interview: Shailene Woodley, Naomi Watts, and Octavia Spencer". Press conference, collider.com. March 20, 2015.

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• I don't think it is as a trope or as something in our psyches. There's very little wilderness out there but there is wild mind, and the Wild mind that actually, as Gary Snyder says, wants to take care of things. There's an elegant quality to the wild mind.

  Anne Waldman

  Psych, Thinking, Mind

  Source: logosjournal.com

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• There's the trope about an impending "global-warming encyclical." The pope is preparing an encyclical on nature and the environment, including the human environment (which includes the moral imperative of a culturally affirmed and legally recognized right to life from conception until natural death). So what happens? A low-ranking Vatican official for self-promotion gives an interview to the Guardian in which he claims that this is a global-warming encyclical - which he couldn't possibly have known, as the document wasn't drafted yet.

  George Weigel

  Self, Giving, Interviews

  Source: eppc.org

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• One of the things that bugs me about the Western Literary Tradition is that the conventions of narrative in particular seem to confine the stories you can tell about characters to tropes of bone-headed action and old models of psychological realism. And as readers, too, we have been conditioned to understand characters as - and forgive me for saying it out loud - what the market says they should be. Namely, safe, clean, proper.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Character, Forgive Me, Forgiving

  Source: therumpus.net

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• If you want to appeal to people of different languages and cultures, you have to move toward tropes that are universally recognized. Games, references, subtleties that only work in your language are hardly useful.

  Tim Parks

  Moving, Games, People

  Source: theuntranslated.wordpress.com

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• I feel like we can prove in real time the old trope that comedy is tragedy plus time.

  Mike Birbiglia

  Real, Tragedy, Comedy

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• I always wanted to create a project that would allow me to think about cross cultural relationships and hybridization but did not want to use my personal story or standard tropes of multiculturalism.

  Saya Woolfalk

  Thinking, Want, Stories

  Source: badatsports.com

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• I think the idea was to make a horror film that became a science-fiction film with a lot of melodramatic tropes.

  Nicolas Winding Refn

  Thinking, Ideas, Fiction

  Source: uk.businessinsider.com

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• Star Wars film is breaking all previous box office records. (Why might we want to revisit those characters, that narrative, those jokes and tropes again, in this way, right now? I wonder what it will turn out to reveal about the economics and politics of this moment.)

  Laura Mullen

  Stars, War, Character

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The other thing is that it's really hard to separate out the harassment from everything we do. When we started creating Tropes, we were hyper-aware of the intense scrutiny, the intense harassment, and the intense pressure to do something meaningful given the attention both positive and negative. That's carried over in terms of making sure that I produce the best work that I can, that's the most accurate, the most sensitive and engaged.

  Anita Sarkeesian

  Meaningful, Creating, Attention

  Source: www.marieclaire.com

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