Quotes About Themes

#1. Climbing has a lot of themes that are applicable to people, no matter who you are.

Kevin Jorgeson

#2. I did a cake for the 60th birthday of Elton John, for Britney Spears' 27th birthday and for the 'Circus' album she put out - the cake had circus themes. I prepared a cake for a surprise 82nd birthday event for the architect Frank Gehry; the cake was comprised of mini-replicas of his buildings.

Ron Ben-Israel

#3. I've explored a variety of directions and themes over the years. But I think in my painting you can see the signature of one artist, the work of one wrist.

Helen Frankenthaler

#4. Demonic figures and occult themes have disappeared from modern magic.

David Copperfield

#5. I have a vision of artists putting into film, drama, literature, music, and paintings great themes and great characters from the Book of Mormon.

Ezra Taft Benson

#6. I love different themes, different venues, different movies. I love to jump about and tackle different subjects. I have no intellectual master plan.

Ridley Scott

#7. You never know when some small thing will lead to a big idea. Travel is very inspirational - but it's in the ordinary that I find my themes of love and work and family.

Adriana Trigiani

#8. The themes I sing about tend to be centered on love, but in the most total, general way 360 degrees of love.

Andrea Bocelli

#9. I'm interested in themes that endure from generation to generation.

David Guterson

#10. I think books with spiritual themes simply point to the deeper mysteries of life - to what lies beyond us, to what's hidden inside of us, or perhaps to an understanding of what truly matters.

Sue Monk Kidd

#11. We constantly encounter themes that arouse sexual desire, often coupled with themes of violence. If our collective consciousness is filled with violent sexual seeds, why should we be surprised when there is sexual abuse of children, rape, and other violent acts?

Thich Nhat Hanh

#12. It goes without saying that a good Catholic novel should be good craftsmanship, good writing skills. The creative person must always be engaged in the long labor of perfecting the tools of his art. Yet the work itself need not be explicitly evangelical in its themes and plots.

Michael O'Brien

#13. I find I can't get rid of my trashiness as an artist. A lot of my themes in painting, to the extent that there are intentional themes, are meant to bring that conundrum into high relief.

John Currin

#14. 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

#15. To begin ... To begin ... How to start? I'm hungry. I should get coffee. Coffee would help me think. Maybe I should write something first, then reward myself with coffee. Coffee and a muffin. Okay, so I need to establish the themes. Maybe a banana-nut. That's a good muffin.

Charlie Kaufman

#16. The character of a life isn't set in ten big moments. The character of a life is set in ten thousand little moments of everyday life. It's the themes of struggles that emerge from those little moments that reveal what's really going on in our hearts.

Paul David Tripp

#17. I think the themes of belonging and parentage and love are obviously universal.

Christopher Eccleston

#18. In general, the main themes emerge early for each book, even before the storyline and characters, as I research the time and place I want to draw upon. Having said that, every single book so far has offered me surprises en route, and these include motifs that come forward as I am writing.

Guy Gavriel Kay

#19. Reality is far more complex and messy than many of the grander themes and explanations would have us believe.

Peter Dicken

#20. [Robert]Ford had the idea that through fame he would receive some personal validity, but he didn't. I feel that these are not the main themes, but certainly themes that are at play in this film [ Assassination of Jesse James].

Brad Pitt

#21. Working on the themes I was interested in, through the context of a particular family, was a very economical way of dealing with a lot of the issues I was concerned with.

Atom Egoyan

#22. Let us remember that humanity's story has only two perennially recurring themes: struggle and progress.

Brendon Burchard

#23. An artist, as much as a writer or composer, needed themes, needed ideas.

Hanya Yanagihara

#24. I never found even in my juvenile hours that it was necessary to go a thousand miles in search of themes for moralizing.

Horace Walpole

#25. 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.

Amy Klobuchar

#26. When I look back over my novels what I find is that when I think I'm finished with a theme, I'm generally not. And usually themes will recur from novel to novel in odd, new guises.

Richard Russo

#27. I am not one to compare long melodies as did Mozart. I can't get beyond short themes. But what I can do, is to utilize such a theme, paraphrase it and extract everything that is in it, and I don't think there's anybody today who can match me at that.

Stefan Zweig

#28. Once a novel gets going and I know it is viable, I don't then worry about plot or themes. These things will come in almost automatically because the characters are now pulling the story.

Chinua Achebe

#29. Some months ago, while I was preparing a new work, I told a young cinema executive my intention of including in a soundtrack two themes from Bach. But when he asked me which has been the last hit from that Bach?, then I knew that I had no longer place in cinema.

Maurice Jarre

#30. I always thought of vampires, especially the young-adult ones, as a metaphor for sex - sucking blood, forbidden, taboo. I think they just ooze sex. Vampires are all the big themes in life in one attractive, bloodsucking package.

Melissa De La Cruz

#31. The themes that make one laugh always stem from poverty, hunger, misery, old age, sickness, and death. These are the themes that make Italians laugh, anyway.

Mario Monicelli

#32. I'd already made the decision before I'd even read it-just because it was John Sayles. Then when I read it, the themes were actually themes that have been a big part of my life.

Mary Steenburgen

#33. 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.'

Rob Lowe

#34. It is remarkable how a man cannot summarize his thoughts in even the most general sort of way without betraying himself completely, without putting his whole self into it, quite unawares, presenting as if in allegory the basic themes and problems of his life.

Thomas Mann

#35. She sighed once, wishing she had a talent for the details of telling stories. She wasn't bad at themes, she mused, but she could never figure out how to turn a theme into an engaging tale.

Nora Roberts

#36. One yearns unspeakably for a composer who gives out his pair of honest themes, and then develops them unashamed, and then hangs a brisk coda to them, and then shuts up.

H.L. Mencken

#37. In a way, producing, experiencing, and interacting with art is like participating in a long-running conversation that artists have been having and will keep having in the future. Themes

Derek Yu

#38. Explicitly Christian themes are regularly excluded from news articles.

Gary DeMar

#39. Interest in certain themes doesn't mandate a personal stake or personal experience of those themes. I've killed people in plays, but no one asks me what it's like to kill people.

Billy Crudup

#40. So many things fail to interest us, simply because they don't find in us enough surfaces on which to live, and what we have to do is to increase the number of planes in our mind, so that a much larger number of themes can find a place in it at the same time

Jose Ortega Y Gasset

#41. ...there are no new themes for a writer, only new ways of setting down old themes, new eyes to wander among old rocks.

Jim Crumley

#42. All my pictures are a kind of revision of my original idea. This is surely very different from the way in which Japanese or Chinese artists work: their themes are pre-ordained, whereas mine are invented at will.

Antoni Tapies

#43. You want comedic themes to be recogniseable life truths that we all battle with, and with that comes the healing properties of comedy.

Miranda Hart

#44. I adore themes of hope and courage and the ways we find meaning through suffering.

Ruta Sepetys

#45. Every man who has an idol or admires someone can recognise its themes. It's not only a film about the relationship between fans and idols, it's also a love story, a story of a man who is depressed, who has problems in his relationship with his teenage step-children.

Eric Cantona

#46. 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.

Elaine Pagels

#47. I tell myself it does not matter what one reads
favorite authors, particular themes
as long as we read something. It is not even important to own the books.

Helen Simonson

#48. One of the themes in my novels is that our crises can turn into blessings. We can feel like our world has crumbled, but ten years down the road when we look back on that time, we can see God's hand at work. I love writing that theme into my books.

Terri Blackstock

#49. I remember when one dressed the part for the West End, and strolled with yellow gloves and a walking-stick. But that world has gone, and another takes its place, eyes see differently, emotions react to other themes. Men weep at jazz, and violence has become sexual. Time marches on.

Charlie Chaplin

#50. Shakespeare is all big themes, like the most amazing love, or the most scary war.

Anna Torv

#51. Some novels present a story form many points of view. Most movies tell only one person's side of the story. Sometime it's easy to use the strongest point of view, or find the character with the most dramatic experience. It depends on which themes the scriptwriter wants to explore.

Seth Grahame-Smith

#52. There's never really been a tradition of making films about Jewish themes or using Judaism as a constant.

James Gray

#53. I found it amazing people can think that art must be connected to religion. Religion may give art themes, but there would still be art without religion. Bach is not proof that art exists.

Michel Onfray

#54. But it's much more exciting to make Die Hard. One of the reasons that I think that movie is so successful is it deals with those very important blue-collar relationship themes. But it's more visually beautiful to show things blowing up. It just gives you more on the screen.

Penn Jillette

#55. My mum used to tell me to never boil my cabbages twice, and I think it's artistically valid. While I do find myself on similar themes in my books, I try not to repeat myself, and that's something which is all too easy to do in series books.

Geraldine McCaughrean

#56. While many of my musicals deal with big themes and ideas, I don't intentionally go looking to write shows like that. A story will interest me, and then somewhere along the way, I discover that hidden inside are these epic themes.

Stephen Schwartz

#57. I like Ronald Reagan, who didn't play crass politics, and he just articulated and delivered on broad themes that were needed. Free markets meant free markets. Deregulation. Lower tax rates. Strong national defense. And he was credible and believable.

Dave Brat

#58. I knew that I wanted to create rich themes, and something that people might really relate to emotionally. That was the quest, authenticity, and then just to make the audience feel something.

John Debney

#59. People like scary stories. There's a fascination with fear themes, and we want to face those things in a weird, subconscious way.

Mel Gibson

#60. French architecture always manages to combine the most magnificent underlying themes of architecture; like Roman design, it looks to the community.

Stephen Gardiner

#61. And like an echo, God often uses the repetitive events and themes in daily life to get my attention and draw me closer to himself. - The Sacred Echo

Margaret Feinberg

#62. Topography is one of my chief themes in my poetry..about the country, the suburbs and the seaside ... then there come's love ... and increasingly; the fear of death.

John Betjeman

#63. As I'm writing, I start to see connections, and themes I didn't see, and that sparks other things. So then I go back and rewrite things or alter them. It's a combination of intuition and a lot of finessing. It becomes a combination of the rational and the irrational.

Charlie Kaufman

#64. I'm not saying it's a bad thing to do, but when you try to deal with prescient themes in the present, that is what you're doing.

Quentin Tarantino

#65. I do seem to have a lot of family secrets in my novels. I guess I'm one of those writers who is often writing about the same sort of themes, but taking different angles on them.

Nancy Werlin

#66. What I write is very personal, but not autobiographical. It's more 'thematically personal' - what's up in my life in terms of themes at the moment.

Josh Radnor

#67. I think vampires are different from human beings, but they're sentenced to eternity on this planet. They have the same confusion about love and permanence, integrity, and denial. These qualities really are the same in vampire characters as in humans. I think they're universal themes.

Alexandra Cassavetes

#68. The winds that blow our billions away return burdened with themes of scorn and dispraise.

Garet Garrett

#69. I stick to simple themes. Love. Hate. No nuances. I stay away from psychoanalyst's couch scenes. Couches are good for one thing.

John Wayne

#70. In my acting, I have to identify with something in the character. The big tough boy on the side of right - that's me. Simple themes. Same me from the nuances. All I do is sell sincerity and I've been selling the hell out of that ever since I started.

John Wayne

#71. Railing and praising were his usual themes; and both showed his judgment in extremes. Either over violent or over civil, so everyone to him was either god or devil.

John Dryden

#72. 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.

Sherwin B. Nuland

#73. 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.

Deana Carter

#74. There are three great themes in science in the twentieth century : the atom, the computer, and the gene.

Harold E. Varmus

#75. They were like English teachers who took the fun out of a perfectly good book by breaking it down into themes and sentence structures

Tawni O'Dell

#76. Illiada by Homer is one of the great stories in literature. And I thought its themes really resonated today, whether that was my projection or Homer's intentions. It didn't seem like we had come very far.

Brad Pitt

#77. The first poem I ever wrote, about loss, when I was 5 years old, expressed the themes of everything I would ever write.

Marguerite Young

#78. The commonalities include the following, in the order of the Moses myth as in the Bible. For the exact book or tablet in which these themes appear, please consult the epic itself.

D.M. Murdock

#79. I try to watch a movie a day, if not more, and through movies, I learned about so many different political themes I hadn't been interested in and cultural things I hadn't been aware of and economic factors I hadn't thought about.

Hideo Kojima

#80. 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

#81. A lot of modern film scoring is about a lack of themes, so I try to find ways of using music that doesn't necessarily have thematic material in it to make the points when there is thematic material even stronger. It's cool to be able to combine old and new.

Joseph Trapanese

#82. Most of the time when "universal" is used, it's just a euphamism for "white"; white themes, white significance, white culture.

Merle Woo

#83. 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

#84. That was one of your favorite themes: that profusion, replication, popularity wasn't necessarily devaluing, and that time itself made all things rare. You loved to savor the present tense and were more conscious than anyone I have ever met that its every constituent is fleeting.

Lionel Shriver

#85. Issues of power, control, energy fuels, and political strength have become key themes in our current events. We have come a long way from iron spearheads to nuclear warheads, yet the disease of power used for control and domination has remained.

Anodea Judith

#86. Themes around education and learning run through my work.

David Almond

#87. There is more to Indian cinema than just Bollywood. I think regional cinema, especially Tamil and Marathi cinema, are exploring some really bold themes.

Anurag Kashyap

#88. I think one of the primary themes in my work is the paradox of memory, at once fundamental to our sense of who we are and yet elusive, ever-changing, fragmentary. One way to look at this is to say that, therefore, we ourselves are elusive, ever-changing and fragmentary to ourselves.

Floyd Skloot

#89. If you're gonna take people on a journey that deals with some pretty heavy themes, I think you best have a sense of humor, here and there.

Francesca Gregorini

#90. 'I Am Number Four' definitely borrows from a whole bunch of genres and has a whole bunch of different themes throughout. And I think if it was just one stale two-dimensional thing then it would be kind of boring. And I think they did a fantastic job.

Callan McAuliffe

#91. There's practical political considerations obviously, but there's also these broader themes, which is like, I don't want to be the manager of the Middle East.

Jeffrey Goldberg

#92. After finishing the work I start rearranging the parts again and eventually start to work with themes - images and thoughts and things.

Tim Zuck

#93. Dick explored sociological, political and metaphysical themes in novels dominated by monopolistic corporations, authoritarian governments, and altered states.

Philip K. Dick

#94. I am against great themes and great subjects ... You can't film an idea. The camera is an instrument for recording physical impact.

Jean Renoir

#95. Whatever direction your life takes, your underlying themes remain. Discover and explore your themes to open the way for rich creative development.

Nita Leland

#96. I have the same themes over and over again. How I'm saying it keeps changing or growing.

Joyce Tenneson

#97. With my students, I don't offer any simple tips like that, maybe because my own process is pretty messy, but when we workshop we talk a lot about the deeper subject, which is what the story or novel is about. I think defining a narrative's themes can lay bare a narrative's tensions.

Edan Lepucki

#98. One remarkable feature of the devotional masters is the incredible sense of uniform witness in the midst of such diverse personalities ... and the necessity of Christian simplicity is one of their most consistent themes.

Richard J. Foster

#99. I guess I try to find the humor by juxtaposing deeper themes in literature with what people perceive as being lighter, disposable children's fare in comics.

Robert Sikoryak

#100. I think age is really changing how I write and the themes that I connect with. But there are also things I'm really intrigued about.

Abi Morgan