Top 100 Quotes About Melodrama
#1. Melodrama is one of the most stunning art forms. These are stories where the emotions are big, and the situations are big, and the artists believe in the situation dramatically. There's no irony or distance.
James Gray
#2. Isn't it strange how life turns into melodrama?
Alan Moore
#3. Golf is 20 percent mechanics and technique. The other 80 pecent is philosophy, humor, tragedy, romance, melodrama, companionship, camaraderie, cussedness and conversation.
Grantland Rice
#4. A shadow strolled past the car, indifferent to our curbside melodrama. This was my second time imperiled in a a parked vehicle in the space of three hours. I wondered what goonish spectacles I'd overlooked in my own career as a pavement walker.
Jonathan Lethem
#5. In this context of achievement-and-death, artist who make Happenings are living out the purest melodrama. Their activity embodies the myth of nonsuccess, for Happenings cannot be sold and taken home; they can only be supported ...
Allan Kaprow
#6. THIS ACTION THAT I FORESEE
has nothing to do with melodrama
It is that life as lived by me now is a series of exceptions
I was (am?) not unique but special.
This is why I was an artist
Francesca Woodman
#7. Tragedy and comedy involve an audience, so they must give--sharing themselves to elicit tears and laughter. Melodrama is not such a strategist. It meets no one's expectation but its internal need to feel.
Yiyun Li
#8. When I was a teenager in Milwaukee in the 1980s, life was pretty boring, and I found myself riveted by the sheer melodrama of everyday life of the 1960s.
Rick Perlstein
#9. Ma was out back, head in hands, weaving in and out of her heaped-up crap. It was both melodramatic and not. I mean, when Ma feels something deeply, that's what she does: melodrama. Which makes it, I guess, not melodrama?
George Saunders
#10. I love melodrama. I love the simple fact. When you read Euripides he's a page turner. It's like reading a Mexican comic book romance.
Guy Maddin
#11. Melodrama is one of my working tools and it enables me to obtain effects that would be unobtainable otherwise; on the other hand I am not deliberately melodramatic; don't get too annoyed if I say that I write in the way that I do because I am what I am.
Graham Greene
#12. I believe in God, Sunshine. I've always believed that God exists," he says. And what he says next isn't self-pity or angst or melodrama. It's truth. "I just know that he hates me." Maybe
Katja Millay
#13. There is a fine line I have to walk throughout the writing process in a novel. It is this line between drama and melodrama, and it is this line between evoking genuine emotional power and being manipulative.
Nicholas Sparks
#14. Sentimental blackmailing is the melodrama done by heart over our brain.
Upasana Banerjee
#15. Nobody beats a bunch of journalists for inflating their rather mundane straightforward chores with a lot more melodrama and self-importance than the job should be asked to contain.
Larry King
#16. On the golf course, a man may be the dogged victim of inexorable fate, be struck down by an appalling stroke of tragedy, become the hero of unbelievable melodrama, or the clown in a side-splitting comedy.
Bobby Jones
#17. Tragedy without comedy is melodrama, and comedy without a higher purpose is vacant.
Jesse Kellerman
#18. One can play comedy, two are required for melodrama, but a tragedy demands three.
Elbert Hubbard
#19. Teenagers all think their life is a movie. If you break up with someone or you have a fight, you walk around with movie scores playing in your head. You sort of see yourself suffering as you're suffering. There's a lot of melodrama attached to the real events of your life.
Kenneth Lonergan
#20. In a sense, and as in melodrama, killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it.
Albert Camus
#21. What concerns me fundamentaly is a meteoric burlesk melodrama, born of the immemorial adage love will find a way.
E. E. Cummings
#22. I'm obsessive about the kind of melodrama of getting through the days and trying to make them good and funny and a happy experience. But my feeling towards the fans is that they delivered me from darkness.
Tom Baker
#23. The constraints of melodrama can be a great blessing, because they demand that all the characters involved - as absurd and extreme as they may initially seem - must stay utterly rooted in their own reality, or the whole project collapses.
Stanley Tucci
#24. If a man went simply by what he saw, he might be tempted to affirm that the essence of democracy is melodrama.
Irving Babbitt
#25. Melodrama and melodramatic are not the same thing, and often people make the mistake of confusing the two.
James Gray
#26. Turn your melodrama into a mellow drama.
Ram Dass
#27. We live in a material world, not a dramatic one. And truth resides not in melodrama, but in the precise measure of material things.
Richard Flanagan
#28. So slowly in my mind formed the idea of melodrama, a form I found to perfection in American pictures. They were naive, they were that something completely different. They were completely Art-less.
Douglas Sirk
#29. Penalties are not football. They are not even as television people keep telling us, great drama. They are cheap melodrama.
Simon Barnes
#30. In serious Victorian fiction, as in Shakespearian tragedy, melodrama normally functions as metaphor. The author finds a vivid equivalent for a reality too elaborate or too extended to be briefly depicted.
Ian Gregor
#31. If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody's mercy, then you will probably write melodrama.
Lillian Hellman
#32. I thought you were talking figuratively! I kept asking and you kept saying, "An entrance to Hell," so I thought, Very well, Cabal, have your moment of melodrama now and bathos later when it turns out your talking about Ipswitch or somewhere, but you meant it. You actually meant it literally.
Jonathan L. Howard
#33. She often felt like she had been cast in a supporting
role with the film that was Louise. And there was more melodrama to be found there than a full-scale Merchant-Ivory period production. Tonight, she was certain, would be no exception.
Kerri Thomson
#34. I like melodrama because it is situated just at the meeting point between life and theater.
Luchino Visconti
#35. Try to avoid falseness and strain. Write what you really know about. Make it new. Don't invent melodrama for the sake of it. Don't try to run, let alone fly, before you can walk with ease.
A.S. Byatt
#36. You know, I might miss some of your witticisms when you're gone, but one thing I won't miss? Your overwhelming sense of melodrama and despair. It's too much even for me.
Richelle Mead
#37. I feel the need to chastise myself. A movie that's a partial musical, full-on melodrama, should require a tremendous amount of planning.
Guy Maddin
#38. All the political angst and moral melodrama about getting 'the rich' to pay 'their fair share' is part of a big charade. This is not about economics, it is about politics.
Thomas Sowell
#39. I love how 'melodrama' is a denigrated term - a lower-class citizen to other genres. And yet that's what life is, man.
Todd Haynes
#40. It's been really important to me to create moments where there's a breath or moments where there's a laugh or moments where there's real life that's allowed to seep in through the cracks of whatever melodrama is happening, because that's what does happen in life.
Sarah Polley
#41. We always knew that we didn't want to show Alan Turing in the act of suicide - it was our feeling that would tip over into melodrama too quickly and seem over-the-top.
Graham Moore
#43. What Mr Blyth has been engaged in was not love, my dear Francis. It was romance, a thing to which Mr Blyth has been very prone; together with melodrama. Whatever made you think that melodrama makes Mr Blyth uncomfortable? He revels in it.
Dorothy Dunnett
#44. Actors! The mechanics of cheap melodrama! That isn't death! You scream and choke and sink to your knees but it doesn't bring death home to anyone- it doesn't catch them unawares and start the whisper in their skulls that says- 'One day you are going to die.
Tom Stoppard
#45. The problem play is a melodrama cleansed of invention.
David Mamet
#46. In drama, the characters should determine the story. In melodrama, the story determines the characters.
Sidney Lumet
#47. The cigarette represents a simple pleasure coupled with self-destruction and defiance of death. Melodrama
Benjamin Doolin
#48. We need to get out," I said. My voice sounded raw to me. "Trouble coming."
"No," said a beautiful Sidhe baritone. "Trouble is here."
They appeared from behind their veils, one by one, with so much melodrama that I was mildly surprised that they hadn't each struck some kind of kung fu pose.
Jim Butcher
#49. So, there is no longer striking, nor work, but both simultaneously, that is to say something else: a magic of work, a trompel'oeil, a scenodrama (so as not to say a melodrama) of production, a collective dramaturgy on the empty stage of the social.
Jean Baudrillard
#50. Until Americans stop getting distracted by the Republicans v/s Democrats melodrama, America will move forward towards war, empire & eventually collapse.
Ziad K. Abdelnour
#51. The world sometimes feels like an insane asylum. You can decide whether you want to be an inmate or pick up your visitor's badge. You can be in the world but not engage in the melodrama of it; you can become a spiritual being having a human experience thoroughly and fully.
Deepak Chopra
#52. Of course real horror does not depend upon the melodrama of shadows or even the conspiracies of night.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#53. Plot and melodrama were in every life; in some so briefly as hardly to be recognized, in others-in that of certain men and women in the public eye, for instance-they were almost in the nature of a continuous performance.
Gertrude Atherton
#54. I've always loved Victorian melodrama. And I've always liked larger-than-life theater, providing it's truthful and honest. I like what the theater can provide in energy and bombast - I enjoy it when it's large, and by that I don't mean in size, I mean in emotions. Shakespeare did that.
Harold Prince
#55. If I'm going to go to the opera, I want to see the costumes and the melodrama.
Jaime Winstone
#56. I extract significance from melodrama, a significance which it does not in fact contain; but occasionally, from out of this matter, there escapes a thin beam of light that, seen at the right angle, can crack the shell of mortality.
Tom Stoppard
#57. Addiction is the number one disease of civilization, and it's directly and indirectly related to all other diseases. Besides physical addictions to nicotine, alcohol, and other substances, there are psychological addictions, such as the addiction to work, sex, television, melodrama, and perfection.
Deepak Chopra
#58. Shredded feelings are the fuel that feed the machinery of melodrama. And good melodrama just has honest feelings and is honest about the way people interact.
Guy Maddin
#59. All good, clean stories are melodrama; it's just the set of devices that determines how you show or hide it.
Baz Luhrmann
#60. I thought that jealousy was an idea. It isn't. It's a pain. But I didn't feel as they do in a Broadway melodrama. I didn't want to kill anybody. I just wanted to die.
Floyd Dell
#62. The whole melodrama of the Middle East would be improved if amnesia were as common here as it is in melodramatic plots.
P. J. O'Rourke
#63. I doubt whether any hack, under pressure, could pen such atrocious melodrama,
John Kennedy Toole
#64. Simon Templar was a man who couldn't help spreading melodrama all around him like an infectious disease.
Leslie Charteris
#65. I can say without melodrama or malice that Hollywood ruined my life.
Jerome Charyn
#66. Commercialism is laying its great greasy paw upon everything including the irresponsible quest of thrills; so that, whatever democracy may be theoretically, one is sometimes tempted to define it practically as standardized and commercialized melodrama.
Irving Babbitt
#67. Presently we began to have our slices of the national cake," F. Scott Fitzgerald remembered, "and our idealism only flared up when the newspapers made melodrama out of such stories as Harding and the Ohio Gang or Sacco and Vanzetti.
Bruce Watson
#68. I barely watch TV apart from the news. Most of it is rubbish. There's all this reality nonsense and dross. I think there's a market for a well-produced, well-written melodrama like 'Dallas.' It's pure entertainment.
Larry Hagman
#69. 'Somewhere in Time' is in the top-five cheesiest movies ever made. It's super melodrama.
Mark Duplass
#71. I think that melodrama is a safe way of suffering, because your suffering is fake. That's why I like melodrama.
Luis Negron
#72. He had the air of a spy in a melodrama, missing nothing, liking nothing, looking forward to the great day when everything would be turned upside down.
Kurt Vonnegut
#73. The quirky little melodrama that unfolded in Bosnia on 28 June 1914 played the same role in the history of the world as might a wasp sting on a chronically ailing man who is maddened into abandoning a sickbed to devote his waning days to destroying the nest
Max Hastings
#74. Melodrama is something that is created ... I don't seen a melodramatic episode of '90210' or any show that relies on that and think, 'Oh, that's life. That's how I experience it.'
Peter Horton
#75. It's an ongoing process, in the script, on the set and in the editing room, to make sure you are being true to the emotion of the film without turning it into a melodrama, and making sure you're getting all the laughs you can without it turning into just some stupid comedy.
Jon Turteltaub
#76. Being in the moment means not being distracted by the melodrama and hysteria around you. Present-moment awareness allows solutions to emerge.
Deepak Chopra
#77. I think of myself as a realistic writer, not a creator of soap opera or melodrama.
Joyce Maynard
#78. I think that's what distinguishes Schmidt, really. In the movies now, so much of what is appealing to an audience is the dramatic or has to do with science fiction, and Schmidt is simply human. There's no melodrama; there's no device, It's just about a human being.
Jack Nicholson
#79. ADMIRABLY BOLD. There's something grand about the film's sincerity and the intensity of its emotions and something fresh and bold about the way director Gray uses the conventions of romantic melodrama.
A.O. Scott
#80. We see daily that our lives are terrible and little, without continuity, buyable and salable at any moment, mere blips on a screen, that this is the way we live now. Memory marketed as nostalgia; terror reduced to mere suspense, to melodrama.
Adrienne Rich
#81. Kenney knows two essential truths about melodrama: First that it is most powerful when combined with irony and understatement; and second that it is a salient feature of modern life.
Stefan Kanfer
#82. Mr. Scott Fitzgerald deserves a good shaking. Here is an unmistakable talent unashamed of making itself a motley to the view. The Great Gatsby is an absurd story, whether considered as romance, melodrama, or plain record of New York high life.
L.P. Hartley
#83. And I have two eyes. I've seen that little melodrama play out between you and that other tracker. Fish? Flounder? What's his name?
Amanda Hocking
#84. I work intentionally to try and make dense, complex things. We can move between genres and forms, from something that looks like a PowerPoint lecture to something that looks like an informercial to something that looks like a cinematic melodrama.
Elizabeth Price
#86. I love 'Glee.' I cry all the time when I watch 'Glee' because I don't know if it's satire or melodrama and that makes me feel like the writing is aware of itself, and that makes it okay to cry.
David Sedaris
#87. To avoid melodrama, recognize that emotions run along a continuum, from mild to extreme. For each situation, know where your character is along that continuum and choose appropriate descriptors.
Angela Ackerman
#88. You just make a game out of relaxing in the face of its melodrama. You simply learn how to release the tendency for getting drawn into the energy.
Michael A. Singer
#89. [H]istory is a melodrama on the theme of parasitism, characterized by scenes that are exciting or dull, as the case may be, and many a sudden stagetrick.
Max Nordau
#90. Parsi theater was known for melodrama.
Irrfan Khan
#92. I cry all the time when I watch 'Glee' because I don't know if it's satire or melodrama and that makes me feel like the writing is aware of itself, and that makes it OK to cry.
David Sedaris
#93. Social questions are too sectional, too topical, too temporal to move a man to the mighty effort which is needed to produce greatpoetry. Prison reform may nerve Charles Reade to produce an effective and businesslike prose melodrama; but it could never produce Hamlet, Faust, or Peer Gynt.
George Bernard Shaw
#94. Say what you like about melodrama, it beats confusion. The truth is we ought have a chance to say a little something when it's getting dark. We ought to have a closing scene.
Leif Enger
#95. When people look at me, they automatically assume I'm dark and weird. Why can't they see the truth? I'm just a girl, trying to find my place in the world.
Gena Showalter
#96. Living alone, with no one to consult or talk to, one might easily become melodramatic, and imagine things which had no foundation on fact.
Agatha Christie
#97. He called me his 'dream.' I guess now I've become his nightmare.
Richard Finney
#98. [ ... ] life had once again, perversely, refused to remain life-sized. It had turned melodramatic: and that embarrassed him.
Salman Rushdie
#99. Melodramas of moral courage provide satisfaction through the comforting fantasy that our own character would hold steady under the most extreme pressure of dreadful events. [But we must face] the painful awareness that in all likelyhood one's own character would not have stood firm.
Jonathan Shay
#100. Well, hope for your thrilling career - but remember that if there is to be drama in your life somebody must pay the piper in the coin of suffering. If not you - then someone else.
L.M. Montgomery
