Story Themes Quotes

#1. I try to tell a story that's good enough to win the right to integrate eternal themes into it. If it's poorly written or comes across as a sermon, then obviously you don't reach people, because they're aware that you're imposing something on a story that isn't innate to it.

Randy Alcorn

#2. 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

#3. An expert is someone who takes something you already know and makes it sound confusing.

Evan Esar

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. Ray Comfort's got a fabulous film. Oh boy, this is going to cause the halls of academia to have a few conversations around the cafeteria.

Janet Parshall

#7. 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

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

Brendon Burchard

#9. Living erotically is opening oneself up to nature
externally and within.

Kristie LeVangie

#10. 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

#11. The price of freedom may be high, but never so costly as the loss of freedom.

Ronald Reagan

#12. This is where Grey slept. In twenty-four hours, Thomas is going to erase his dreams.

Harriet Reuter Hapgood

#13. The support of our Soul and the joy that it bestows is sufficient to our need and carries us forward.

Genevieve Gerard

#14. They're classic themes, which is why I think it's such a great story to look at again. The concept of being loyal to your friends, to the point where you'd even die for them, is a great subject.

Adrian Hodges

#15. I love outsider stories. And I also like a lot of genre fiction, too. So I wanted to write a literary book that flirted with thriller and fantasy and even science fiction. I wanted the coming-of-age story and the love story to be about "outsiderdom" - one of the themes I am most interested in.

Porochista Khakpour

#16. We sold more iPads in the last quarter alone than any PC manufacturer sold in their entire line.

Tim Cook

#17. It's funny,' I noted in the diary, 'how often I seem to build a story around one sentence, nearly always the last one, too. The themes are a bit depressing but I just can't get rid of that.

Daphne Du Maurier

#18. You have to think of your brand as a kind of myth. A myth is a compelling story that is archetypal, if you know the teachings of Carl Jung. It has to have emotional content and all the themes of a great story: mystery, magic, adventure, intrigue, conflicts, contradiction, paradox.

Deepak Chopra

#19. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#20. I don't really do themes. I might accidentally, but themes are an emergent phenomena of the writing of the book, of just trying to get a story out there.

Iain Banks

#21. I don't really set out to explore grand themes. I set out to tell a story. And one I have to be able to imagine right through.

John Irving

#22. It is a very beautiful story, 'The Crow.' It is a very tragic story with huge emotional themes.

Luke Evans

#23. I have no private interest in the reception of my inventions by the world, having never made, nor proposed to make, the least profit by any of them.

Benjamin Franklin

#24. The time is come," he spoke quietly. "Now, when lesser folk would wither, thou must be true to the blood of thine ancestors. Much greatness is bred in thee; accept now this terrible mantle and take a step nearer thy destiny.

Robin Jarvis

#25. 'The Wizard of Oz' and 'Alice in Wonderland' inspired me. I wanted to take those themes and try to bring it into a more 21st story with aliens.

Tony DiTerlizzi

#26. Every day I fantasise about situations and little themes I see in front of me that would make a good beginning of a story. But one has to be disciplined and just sit down and do it.

Emilia Fox

#27. I look for two things when I am about to launch into a book. First, there has to be a dramatic arc to the story itself that will carry me, and the reader, from beginning to end. Second, the story has to weave through larger themes that can illuminate the world of the subject.

David Maraniss

#28. Art is built on the deepest themes of human meaning: good and evil, beauty and ugliness, life and death, love and hate. No other story has incarnated those themes more than the story of Jesus.

John Ortberg

#29. 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.

Brian Selznick

#30. This is one hell of a business I picked to be in.

Taylor Dayne

#31. The themes, ideas and the characters from 'Skyfall' can obviously continue on, because it is a franchise, and it is an ongoing story.

John Logan

#32. I always tell my students, about the biggest baddest things in life you must try to write small and light, save the big writing for the unexpected tiny thing that always makes or breaks a story.

Pam Houston

#33. I have my mother's hips ... I have an apple bottom.

Brendon Urie

#34. Hollywood is McWorld's storyteller, and it inculcates secularism, passivity, consumerism, vicariousness, impulse buying, and an accelerated pace of life, not as a result of its overt themes and explicit story lines but by virtue of what Hollywood is and how its products are consumed.

Benjamin R. Barber

#35. One's story isn't a skin to be shed - it's inescapable, one's body and blood. You go on pumping it out till you die, the story veined with the themes of your life, the ever-recurring story that's at once your invention and the invention of you.

Philip Roth

#36. If one wants to go on living, one must evolve. Before, when we composed, we would start by a series of music themes. Once created, we would hire writers and lyricists to make up the text and the story line. I was the first to do this backwards with 'Man of La Mancha.'

Mitch Leigh