Quotes About Subject Matter

#1. The problem of the librarian is that books are multi-dimensional in their subject matter but must be ordered on one-dimensional shelves.

Neal Stephenson

#2. Reader, I am myself the subject of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and so vain a matter.

Bernard Malamud

#3. Personal experience is the surest method by which one can determine the truth of a supposition, no matter how reputable the reporter, since so many experiences are subject to individual proclivities.

Nick Offerman

#4. In nature everything is connected, interwoven, subject to natural law. We cannot separate ourselves from that, no matter how hard we try.

Jeffrey R. Anderson

#5. I realized that I was African when I came to the United States. Whenever Africa came up in my college classes, everyone turned to me. It didn't matter whether the subject was Namibia or Egypt; I was expected to know, to explain.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#6. Packs a Huge Emotional Punch! Graceful Writing, Great Acting, Exquisite Direction, Suspense, Profound Subject Matter and It Rocks!

Rex Reed

#7. The shows you can do in cable are just more buzzworthy and are about subject matter that's more unusual or dark. And broadcast shows tend to be more mainstream or middle-of-the-road.

Robert Greenblatt

#8. Method is always tied to subject matter, and in dealing with life in general there is no such thing as a single scientific method.

Dallas Willard

#9. We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless.

Mark Rothko

#10. I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in ... but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape.

George Orwell

#11. Nothing disturbs me more than superficiality and mere sloganizing on matters of public policy, and the suspicion that what the speaker is saying represents the full extent of his knowledge on the subject.

Preston Manning

#12. Anything that excites me for any reason, I will photograph; not searching for unusual subject matter, but making the commonplace unusual.

Edward Weston

#13. I do not see emotions and feelings as the intangible and vaporous qualities that many presume them to be. Their subject matter is concrete, and they can be related to specific systems in body and brain, no less so than vision or speech.

Antonio R. Damasio

#14. No matter how rich and prosperous, a nation without independence, cannot be subject to any behaviour before the humanity, at a higher level than serving.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk

#15. One's relation to one's house, in other words, is hardly a relation between a pure subject and a pure object - between an active intelligence, or mind, and a purely passive chunk of matter.

David Abram

#16. The first picture of his I ever saw was during a lecture at the Rhyl camera club. I was 16 and the speaker was Emrys Jones. He projected the picture upside down. Deliberately, to disregard the subject matter to reveal the composition. It's a lesson I've never forgotten.

Philip Jones Griffiths

#17. My pictures are not that interesting, nor the subject matter. They are simply a collection of facts; my book is more like a collection of Ready-mades.

Edward Ruscha

#18. A life spent largely among books, and in the exercise of a literary profession, has very obvious drawbacks, as a subject-matter, when one comes to write about it.

Mary Augusta Ward

#19. I very much enjoyed doing 'Law & Order,' playing a killer - that was fun, and they had a family feel around the set, so it was a happy show to do even though the subject matter was quite the opposite.

Carol Burnett

#20. I remember when I wrote songs when I was about 16, they all sounded the same because I didn't know anything. And all the subject matter was all the same because I hadn't actually done much.

Gin Wigmore

#21. I have had UFO experiences, and yet, at the same time, I can easily be convinced that none of it is true. It's hard to say whether or not you're a believer. I've been interested in that subject matter, like lots of people. Perhaps foolishly, I've allowed some of that stuff to creep into my music.

Frank Black

#22. Critic asks: 'And what, sir, is the subject matter of that painting?' - 'The subject matter, my dear good fellow, is the light.

Claude Monet

#23. While the subject matter is lynching, on a deeper level, this novel is about identity. Whom and what we identify ourselves with determines our characters, determines who we are, and what we do.

Julius Lester

#24. If there was anything that I learned with my own writing process, maybe there's too many choices what to write about. Just the amount of subject matter in the world these days; maybe that feels chaotic for me.

Eddie Vedder

#25. Compassion is something really worthwhile. It is not just a religious or spiritual subject, not a matter of ideology. It is not a luxury, it is a necessity.

Dalai Lama

#26. In fact, the more each person can remove his or her ego from the discussion and focus on the subject matter, the more fruitful the conversation will be for all involved.

Matthew Kelly

#27. It's the subject matter that counts. I'm interested in revealing the subject in a new way to intensify it. A photo is able to capture a moment that people can't always see.

Harry Callahan

#28. Hence Proust's assertion that the greatness of works of art has nothing to do with the apparent quality of their subject matter, and everything to do with the subsequent treatment of that matter.

Alain De Botton

#29. It has long been my belief that everyone's library contains an Odd Shelf. On this shelf rests a small, mysterious corpus of volumes whose subject matter is completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection, reveals a good deal about its owner.

Anne Fadiman

#30. As in play, it rests on a common willingness of the participants in conversation to lend themselves to the emergence of something else, the Sache or subject matter which comes to presence and presentation in conversation.

Hans-Georg Gadamer

#31. I got quite bored, serving in the bar. Since I was there, the customers wouldn't talk about women, and with half their subject matter denied them, it was: horses, silence; horses, silence.

Bernadette Devlin

#32. For me, no matter how serious the subject is, when I try to write about it, I have to write about it from a comic point of view. It's just the way it comes out.

Julie Davis

#33. For me, if the writing and - by extension - the subject matter and the characters are all good, it doesn't matter if it's film or TV. Each medium has great things going for it.

Adam Croasdell

#34. I can think of films that I'm producing right now that are extremely hard-hitting, graphic films, that nobody necessarily wants to see, graphic in terms of violence, of adult content and racial and historical subject matter.

Aaron Eckhart

#35. When doing family entertainment, you don't actually worry about kids. You know what you can't do. But in terms of sensibility and sophistication and wit and ambition, aim for your own taste level, and kids will - if they're interested in the subject matter - be glad that you did.

Nina Jacobson

#36. The sciences which take socio-historical reality as their subject matter are seeking, more intensively than ever before, their systematic relations to one another and to their foundation.

Wilhelm Dilthey

#37. How do you find a way to say what an extraordinary experience it is to be alive in this world? That is the kind of subject matter I try to work with.

Keith Carter

#38. The subject matter is very tricky. It's about the Munich massacre and what Mossad did afterwards with the assassination squads. I think it's a turning point in history, especially for the Palestinians.

Daniel Craig

#39. The complexity of language, he thought to himself, lies not in its subject matter but in our knotted understanding.

Alexander Theroux

#40. The first songs I wrote were catchy, but the subject matter was God.

Katy Perry

#41. No matter how beautiful the paper, artwork, printing, and binding, I'm seldom drawn to a book unless it's by a writer I care about or on a subject that appeals to me.

Michael Dirda

#42. The full weight and mystery of your art rests upon your relationship to your subject matter.

Keith Carter

#43. Tech Jacket shares the same tone as Invincible, but the subject matter is very different. Where Invincible is about perfection, Tech Jacket is about flaws.

Robert Kirkman

#44. When that happens - when risk is taken and the filmmakers dive into the subject matter without a parachute - very often what you get it something with those qualities that make it age well with the public.

Francis Ford Coppola

#45. The test of interesting people is that subject matter doesn't matter.

Louis Kronenberger

#46. Your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.

Kurt Vonnegut

#47. I love directing, It means so much to me to direct stories about subject matter that I care deeply about. I can act in many things, and you can try to experience different characters, but to direct is years of your life and you have to really love it and believe in it.

Angelina Jolie

#48. Unless a Western's made money - doesn't matter who made the money, doesn't matter what the subject is - if the last one didn't make any money, you can't make another one for a four-year period. Westerns more than any genre.

Val Kilmer

#49. Some movies I make for myself. I just sort of make them for myself. I do that sometimes when the subject matter is very sensitive and very personal and I really can't imagine I'm an audience.

Steven Spielberg

#50. I believe in research. Each movie at Pixar involves research with college professors or taking trips to learn as much as we can about a particular subject matter.

John Lasseter

#51. I don't think there's a subject matter that can't absorb 3-D; that can't tolerate the addition of depth as a storytelling technique.

Martin Scorsese

#52. Anthropology never has had a distinct subject matter, and because it doesn't have a real method, there's a great deal of anxiety over what it is.

Clifford Geertz

#53. Scientists - who prefer explanations subject to laboratory tests - figure that everything we see today was as inevitable as wrinkles, once the Big Bang established physics. Stars and planets were cooked up as huge clouds of matter collapsed and coalesced.

Seth Shostak

#54. Sick people are everywhere. Just watch Criminal Minds."
"If that's their subject matter, I'm thinkin' I'll avoid it.

Kristen Ashley

#55. You can't just decide to take the subject matter of The Bible and figure out you can just change what you want. I mean, the audience knows, and if you give them a Biblical story, you better get it right.

Mark Burnett

#56. If one cannot state a matter clearly enough so that even an intelligent twelve-year-old can understand it, one should remain within the cloistered walls of the university and laboratory until one gets a better grasp of one's subject matter.

Margaret Mead

#57. You must consider, when reading this treatise, that mental perception, because connected with matter, is subject to conditions similar to those to which physical perception is subject.

Maimonides

#58. All inventions are not patentable, and all patented subjects are not inventions.

Kalyan C. Kankanala

#59. I think when you're dealing with very tenuous scenes and difficult and heavy subject matter, it's important to be close intimately with your cast as friends, and be able to diffuse a lot of that tension and trust each other with the work.

Jack Falahee

#60. Why is the mind incapable of deciding its own subject matter? Why when we desperately want to think of one thing to we invariably think of another?

Jeanette Winterson

#61. The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about the characters are going through and to experience the moral paradoxes and struggles of being human.

Tim O'Brien

#62. I would go to sketch groups and draw. I really enjoyed the subject matter, but I wasn't good at it.

Jack Prelutsky

#63. I can tell you that the book 'The Ugly Truth' is about puberty and all the awfulness that comes with that time in a person's life. It was definitely some different subject matter to be writing about, especially knowing some of my audience are second and third graders.

Jeff Kinney

#64. There's always been some concern that adult subject matter should be quarantined from a page that attracts children. Unlike late at night, when 'South Park' and 'Colbert' are on, impressionable minds are wide awake when the newspaper arrives.

Garry Trudeau

#65. A matter that seems to be very clear in terms of the alternative view, is what do you expect to happen in Africa with regard to immune systems, where people are poor, subject to repeat infections and all of that. Surely you would expect their immune systems to collapse.

Thabo Mbeki

#66. When I'm writing, I separate from everyone. Even my band. I push myself, and I'm alone with my thoughts. Separating from friends and comforts and family lets you think a lot deeper about subject matter. Working alone drives me a little crazy, but it makes the writing as honest as possible.

Vic Fuentes

#67. In discussing the subject of free will, the question is not, whether external obstacles will permit a man to execute what he has internally resolved, but whether, in any matter whatever, he has a free power of judging and of willing.

John Calvin

#68. Los Angeles is an industry town, and it has great facilities and personnel. The disadvantage is that everyone there seems to talk about the same subject matter.

Carter Burwell

#69. Seeing, in the finest and broadest sense, means using your senses, your intellect, and your emotions. It means encountering your subject matter with your whole being. It means looking beyond the labels of things and discovering the remarkable world around you.

Freeman Patterson

#70. The darker the subject, the more light you must try to shed on the matter. And vice versa.

Alan Ayckbourn

#71. I began a poem in lines of one syllable. It's rather difficult, but the merit of all things lies in their difficulty. The subject matter is gallant. I'll read you the first canto; it's four hundred verses long and takes one minute.

Alexandre Dumas

#72. The essayist ... can pull on any sort of shirt, be any sort of person, according to his mood or his subject matter - philosopher, scold, jester, raconteur, confidant, pundit, devil's advocate, enthusiast.

E.B. White

#73. Economics is uncertain because its fundamental subject matter is not money but human action. That's why economics is not the dismal science, it's no science at all.

Julian Baggini

#74. A teacher enlarges people in all sorts of ways besides just his subject matter.

Wallace Stegner

#75. The idea of space is given to the artist to change if he can. The subject matter in the abstract is space.

Willem De Kooning

#76. I write very personal songs. Subject matter is usually derived from some internal struggle that I am having.

Corey Smith

#77. See it in terms of paint. We don't learn subject matter, we learn paint. The musician can play any score that is set before him.

Helen Van Wyk

#78. The dreams of existence of that we call time, space, matter, subject, object, yin, yang - everything flows forth from this tai chi.

Frederick Lenz

#79. This time, there have been a lot of interesting discussion about the subject matter and I've had a good time talking about it. And in some of the cases, I'm not just signing books; I'm showing slides and talking about the work.

Leonard Nimoy

#80. As a young man, Yeats spoke to me in a way I could understand. Shakespeare I couldn't understand, but Yeats I could. It was his subject matter and also I really admired the way he put his personal life on the line.

Leonard Cohen

#81. And the truth of the matter is that death is a mystery to me. I have no opinion on the subject.

Oscar Zeta Acosta

#82. Most modern literary criticism is literary and nothing else - that is, it concentrates on an author's style and thinks it rather vulgar to notice his subject matter.

George Orwell

#83. No matter how you cut it, biological science is based to some degree on humanizing the subject matter.

Bruce H. Lipton

#84. I do tend to look at my books in many ways as conceptual fiction, even to the point where I think the author's photograph is part of the package. And I have gone out of my way to select the photograph to connect to the subject matter of each book.

Bret Easton Ellis

#85. I don't get afraid in talking about subject matter that may spark controversy, and I'm not afraid to not be liked. I think that sometimes people pay too much attention to being liked, and it's paralyzing.

Jada Pinkett Smith

#86. What makes a publisher decide to market a book to a particular audience is not the subject matter but the style.

Russell Smith

#87. The beginning of a novel: start a subject, no matter where, and to have the desire to finish, start with very beautiful phrases.

Charles Baudelaire

#88. As for the subject matter in my painting ... it is very often an incidental thing in the background, elusive and unclear, that really stirred me.

William Baziotes

#89. All the old bogeys of 'dignified subject-matter,' of 'balanced compositions,' of 'correct drawing' were laid to rest. The artist was responsible to no one but his own sensibilities for what he painted and how he painted it.

Ernst Gombrich

#90. Subject matter that is not bound to reality offers more opportunity to write a unique story and cinematically present it in very unique ways.

Richard King

#91. There's so much more freedom in film as far as subject matter and what can be said. And then, also, the process is different because there's more time. On movies there's just so much freedom and space to explore in front of the camera.

Dave Franco

#92. Egotorial: An editorial in broadcasting or print media where the subject matter is secondary to the superficial, pretentious, antagonistic, or materialistic ego of the author.

Grant McLachlan

#93. The truth of the matter is that about 99 percent of teaching is making the students feel interestedin the material. Then the other 1 percent has to do with your methods. And that's not just true of languages. It's true of every subject.

Noam Chomsky

#94. Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.

Jane Rule

#95. I read numerous books - loads in fact - and, as I always do when recording a historical project, immersed myself into the subject matter. I spent many hours at Henry's old homes, such as Hampton Court, and visiting the Tower of London. I read no other books during that period.

Rick Wakeman

#96. Everything is pointing to one's own activity of looking, to an awareness and sort of hyper-consciousness of visual perception. The only way I know how to invite this experience is by removing the other things (i.e., subject matter) for you to think about.

Uta Barth

#97. It's hard to look at anything with an objective eye. I think people bring themselves into the equation when they watch a movie. They bring their own prejudices, their own biases, their own feelings toward the subject matter, the characters.

James Ponsoldt

#98. People can get obsessed with romance, they can get obsessed with political paranoia, they can get obsessed with horror. It's isn't the fault of the subject matter that creates the obsession, I don't think.

Adam Arkin

#99. My operas usually come from musical ideas rather than ideas about subject matter.

Harrison Birtwistle

#100. I admire photographers who can take much more ordinarily subject matter and make it transcend that ordinariness, so that it becomes something else fresh and new. It opens this doorway. I really admire people who can do that with photography.

Andy Summers