Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
In my writing with Extreme, there are heavy themes. The cover photo has me with a gun to my neck. I am not advocating suicide. I am taking the philosophy that man is the measure of his own fate.
I never get bored talking about themes dealing with ambition, leadership and what it means to be an American. I love that stuff. I just love it. I've loved it ever since I was on 'The West Wing.'
I had worked for George Bush as a speechwriter, and I read a lot of White House memoirs. They all have two themes: 'It Wasn't My Fault' and 'It Would Have Been Much Worse if I Hadn't Been There.'
I did write a lot of TV themes - I wrote about 45 of them, and a couple of which are still reference and popular today, like 'Diff'rent Strokes' and 'Facts of Life.' But I was a limited musician.
Most horror films fail to scare me. I think 'The Ring' plays more as a psychological thriller. It's smarter, there's more character development and some of the themes explored go a little deeper.
Is it good, bad, or neutral to recognize thematic patterns in your own work? When it comes to recurring themes, I'm of the mind that knowledge is probably not power, at least in terms of the work.
There is great mystery in a church. For me, there is a great privilege to be confronted with the design of a church because it shelters the most powerful themes of humanity: birth, marriage, death.
Angels and Airwaves is a complete, pure reflection of who I am. The philosophy, the spiritualism, the esotericism, the idea of hope and space and the themes about life and grandeur... that's all me.
After this, I took private lessons in Italian from an elementary school teacher. He gave me themes to write about, and some of them turned out so well that he told me to publish them in a newspaper.
I respect Malayalam films the same way I respect Bengali films. I think Malayalam films have not compromised on the essence and have kept their own statement and are coming up with very good themes.
I understand now why Hillary Clinton always wore navy blue pantsuits. Remember, for four years? If you have one or two themes, then you have the same shoes, the same bag. Otherwise, it's a nightmare.
I think you sense the metaphorical resonance of what you're writing without analysing it too carefully. That leads you down dead ends. You stop imagining things and start writing towards these themes.
I love Narcy, he's such a good artist. I know him personally, he's a friend. He's of my generation - he puts out a lot of stuff through music that are themes I like to hit on in my writing and comedy.
When I was 20, Shostakovich was my favorite composer. I still find his Fifth Symphony wonderful, with its outstanding themes and rhythms. That's the piece that made me want to be a classical composer.
I prefer to write books for children instead of reading them. But I do strongly believe in childhood and in respecting childhood innocence. I don't like books for children that deal with adult themes.
It is as true for the writer as for the reader that any novel worth its ink should be an experience first and foremost - not an essay, not a statement, not an orderly rollout of themes and propositions.
Sometimes, I have themes that interest me or that touch on larger issues but, really, I'm just trying to figure out the plot, or how the characters work. I'm trying to make the best story I possibly can.
I think that high school themes are replayed over and over throughout your life, and you try to pretend that it's a phase and that once you're out of high school it's over, but I don't think that's true.
Hmm... at some point when I was making 'Postcards,' it struck me, what the underlying themes for the record would be. It would be about choices, fears and doubts, and it had an existentialist theme to it.
What I think was a really lucky coincidence was that a lot of the themes of 'Okja' are things I write about a lot: cognitive dissonance and corporate greed and also the internal politics of fringe groups.
Eventually, I started writing down a bunch of titles that related to childhood themes and would pair it with an adult situation that either I was going through or someone else in my life was going through.
I'm always thinking about time. That's one of themes I return to in my work, the way the past bears on the present, the way that time is not linear, and how that expresses itself in people's everyday lives.
But I'm a fairly mechanical worker - I tend not to think about themes so much as plot. I want to get the feeling right. If it's moving through tunnels, I ask myself, what is it like to move through tunnels?
I think the themes in my songs are very similar from the first album to the newest one. It's all about the human condition and how we are all trying to learn to live with each other and survive love and life.
Even though 'Star Wars' takes place in another galaxy, a lot of the themes and things that characters deal with in terms of lessons that they're learning are things that are completely relatable to real life.
Unfortunately, many talented people in Hollywood find their values and politics do not reflect the content they create, and many movie themes are in direct contrast with over half of today's American families.
We never dealt with satire or suggestive material. Although some of our films were broad parodies or burlesques of popular dramatic themes, there was no conscious attempt at being either sarcastic or offensive.
I'm certainly a plot and character man. Themes, structure, style - they're valid components of a novel and you can't complete the book without them. But I think what propels me as a reader is plot and character.
If someone were to call me 'the next Amy Tan,' it would not be because - or not primarily because - we have similar themes or subjects or styles. Let's be honest: it would be because we are both Chinese American.
Any underrepresented audience loves to see themselves on TV, but what's more important is that we're writing about universal themes - good versus evil, can you change yourself? These themes resonate for everyone.
Well the themes for me were and remain sex and love and grief and death - the things that make us and undo us, create and destroy, how we breed and disappear and the emotional context that surrounds these events.
I think I approached 'Captain Phillips' as I would any project. I always try to understand the story, characters, and themes as deeply as possible and then work as hard as I can to make those things come to life.
I feel it's our responsibility to keep our ear tuned to public discourse. There's a lot of noise out there, and our responsibility is to pick up on the themes and issues that work their way through all of society.
I never thought I would write about the Book of Revelation. It's so dense; it's so complex and puzzling. But then I found I was thinking about a number of themes, one of which has to do with politics and religion.
And of course Marc Cherry heightens it and makes it hilarious. But there's so many universal themes in the show, and he made it so funny. We knew he was onto something if he could keep it up and, thankfully, he did.
It's true that misunderstanding and lack of understanding are often themes in my fiction, but I am grateful for the moments when true understanding is achieved, especially between writer and reader. It's miraculous.
The fact that we are I don't know how many millions of people, yet communication, complete communication, is completely impossible between two of those people, is to me one of the biggest tragic themes in the world.
What I think of as 'freakonomics' is mostly storytelling around an idea - not a theme but an idea. I like ideas much more than themes. Themes are boring. Themes are, 'Wool is back,' but ideas are, 'Why is wool back?'
Film scores are often based on short themes, and it helps if you've got some way of developing these themes and making them sometimes last 4 minutes and sometimes last 40 seconds. One ends up doing it subconsciously.
Sam Peckinpah's movies probably say more about him than anybody's body of work says about that person. There are running themes in his films that I find eminently fascinating, disturbing, exhausting, and exhilarating.
I'd been writing my own coming-of-age story, and I got to take a lot of that energy and a lot of those moments and themes that I wanted to explore in a much smaller film and then apply them to 'Spider-Man: Homecoming.'
You know, a vampire book is not a book to be the vehicle for big themes and stuff, where sometimes when you're dealing with art or the life of Christ or the oeuvre of Shakespeare, you know, it's a little more ambitious.
The narrative of so many fairy tales are timeless in so many different cultures, and they have been since the dawn of man. They represent escapism, but they all feature themes that have such poignancy in a modern world.
There are resurrection themes in every society that has ever been studied, and it is because not just only do we fantasize about the possibility of resurrection and recovery, but it actually happens. And it happens a lot.
I think all artists are only interested in a couple of themes, really. I'm primarily interested in change and connection as being this restorative force. I write about them because that's what I think about in my own life.
'A Perfect Place' is character-driven. The director for that wanted a couple of identifiable themes with a bunch of variations. That is what I did. The director for 'The Solitude of Prime Numbers' did not want that at all.
I think the only consistent thing is that I like projects that explore different social themes. 'Our Family Wedding' is a comedy, but it deals with two different cultures coming together. It's also about people letting go.
Lib Dems are really good at making very detailed policies but very bad are communicating the core values that drive those policies. I'd like us to say less but more often. We need to focus on a few themes and go hard on them.
For me, the biggest thing was writing memorable themes for the new characters so that ultimately people would have the same identification with 'Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them' as they do with the Harry Potter films.
As a screen composer or film-music writer, I need something that I can work with in the body of the score. Like 'Charade,' 'Moon River,' 'Wine and Roses,' 'Dear Heart' - they were all just themes that grew out of the picture.