Topical Quotes

#1. I was never a topical songwriter.

Bob Dylan

#2. One of the hardest things I've had to deal with in my career is keeping my material topical even though I only release albums every three or four years.

Al Yankovic

#3. As far as what makes a viral video, then it's gotta be something that you've either never seen before, a fresh piece of comedy, or something that relates to something topical.

Adam McKay

#4. I did a couple of sketch shows with Mike Palin and Terry Jones ... and then I got hired by Granada to do a weekly topical show.

Diana Quick

#5. There is a disease to which plays as well as men become liable with advancing years. In men it is called doting, in plays dating.The more topical the play the more it dates.

George Bernard Shaw

#6. An article can be timely, topical, engaged in the issues and personalities of the moment; it is likely to be stale within the month. In five years, it may have acquired the quaint aura of a rotary phone. An article is usually Siamese-twinned to its date of birth.

Cynthia Ozick

#7. It is in the nature of the New Yorker to be as topical as possible, on a level that is often small in scale and playful in intention.

Brendan Gill

#8. I think topical songwriting is a real gift, and it's hard not to be pedantic and show up with the sledgehammer message.

Mary Chapin Carpenter

#9. Any topical subject, if it's Hollywood, will be a couple of years later because you've got to write it, produce it and distribute it, so automatically you're never going to be right on the cutting edge of stories.

George Clooney

#10. I'm free to do what I please, I'm probably not going to do albums. Just because I think releasing tracks as singles is a better way for me to stay topical.

Al Yankovic

#11. You have the hilarity and the great production. These films are distinctive because they are not just topical, they tell good stories and they let scenes play out physically. Apart from the dialogue, the characters also have a non-verbal existence, for example with Scrat.

John Leguizamo

#12. Facebook is about seeing what your friend is doing. Twitter, you follow different people. Flipboard is about passions and interests and topics, and so it's the same social web that all of these products are letting you look at, but Flipboard is coming at it from a more topical point of view.

Mike McCue

#13. I feel that I belong to the 19th century. Some composers' music is very topical. It almost says, 'This is about what I read in newspapers yesterday.' Not mine.

Gordon Getty

#14. The hardest song to write is a protest song, a topical song with meaning.

Joan Baez

#15. [Hemingway] always used to bawl me out for including so much topical stuff. He always claimed that was a great mistake, that in fifty years nobody would understand. He may have been right; it's getting to be true.

John Dos Passos

#16. Every writer scrounges for inspiration in different places, and there's no shame in raiding the headlines. It's necessary, in fact, when attempting contemporary satire. Sharp-edged humor relies on topical reference points.

Carl Hiaasen

#17. I love the old Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly movies; they're so beautiful to look at. It's such a shame we don't make them anymore. Although, I don't know how you could make tap dancing current and topical.

Jamie Bell

#18. I write all my own songs and they are just simple melodies with a lot of lyrics. They usually have to do with current events and what is going on in the news. You can call them topical songs, songs about the news, and then developing into more philosophical songs later.

Phil Ochs

#19. A child's behavior we see on the surface is the reflection of the feelings that are rooted underneath. We can use topical treatments to try to shape what the behavior looks like, but if we really want things to change, we need to address the roots. Nourish the roots, see the growth.

Kelly Bartlett

#20. People tend to think of Brisbane as a sleepy, sub-topical place. I don't know. It's like Baltimore or something. I don't know. You would hear the family dramas going on behind closed doors.

Geoffrey Rush

#21. One of the things that makes this so topical right now is that I think there are an awful lot of American men - and women, but I'm a man, so that's what I can talk about - who feel the American dream has let them down.

James Purefoy

#22. Comedians are always hitting the topical notes that are on everybody's minds.

Yakov Smirnoff

#23. Of course, sometimes when you write personally, you are also writing about society, obliquely reflecting topical issues, but not in a way that people would expect you to or in the way that someone trying to make a point would.

Suzanne Vega

#24. 14. Finally, the last characteristic of the menippea: its concern with current and topical issues. This is, in its own way, the "journalistic" genre of antiquity, acutely echoing the ideological issues of the day.

Mikhail Bakhtin

#25. I wish, in some ways, I was the type of comedian who could do something blistering and topical, but I'm the guy who gets stuck in the revolving door and thinks I should write about that.

Jim Gaffigan

#26. That's the trouble with playing a cutting-edge narcotics detective - you've got to wear what's topical at the moment. My kids tease me about outfits I was wearing last week, let alone in the eighties.

Clark Johnson

#27. 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

#28. Topical application of cayenne creates a repellent effect and provides relief from arthritis pain.

Patricia Gardner

#29. I'd like to be able to be more topical and timely and more of-the-moment and I think the way to do that is, instead of waiting until I have twelve songs to release all at once, just to release them as I come up with them.

Al Yankovic

#30. Improving the skills of HR colleagues. The best learners are also teachers. Investing in building the skills of HR colleagues requires individuals to be clear and disciplined about a topical area, tool, or technology.

David Ulrich

#31. I'm a student of the movies. I'm a student of all media. This is what I do, and I like to immerse myself in what's current and what's topical. And I find that I'm drawn to those things.

Ian Ziering

#32. Most important to any fake story is a plausible, realistic edge with a satirical twist that is topical.

Joey Skaggs

#33. Great books, if long enough and full of topical description and contemporary comment, were now coming into even wider public favor. The lengthier and fuller of comment, the better.

James Purdy

#34. Woody makes a movie as if he were lighting 10,000 safety matches to illuminate a city. Each one is a little epiphany: topical, ethnic, or political.

Gene Wilder

#35. I use beauty as a way of helping people to receive difficult or upsetting ideas. The topical issues are merely a vehicle for making one aware of one's own perceptual shift-which is the real thrill.

Fred Wilson

#36. I didn't work for Jimmy Carter all those years to go to cocktail parties. I was there as a political adviser, a short-order cook, to work on topical matters.

Hamilton Jordan

#37. In a more intellectually rigorous age, I wouldn't be talked about as a satirist at all. I would just be a topical comedian.

Rory Bremner

#38. The conceptual and politically-driven art so popular and considered to be the forefront of contemporary art today is limited by its topicality and will lose its 'punch' when topical concerns move on to other interests.

Scott Kahn

#39. Be personal, and original. Try to work clean. Stay away from topical material, as it does not allow you to craft it to make it better for later. And always remember that it is the fans who will make you or break you.

Gabriel Iglesias

#40. That became the signature Ice-T style - rhymes that were "topical" and "vividly optical." To me it was street-level journalism, real-life observations told in poetry. That's the vision I tried to bring to all my recordings.

Ice-T

#41. The fact that novels and films about confidence tricksters are usually highly successful is based on the observation that the topical and temporary creation of micro-realities (or 'tricks') is not a million miles away from what we're all doing every day.

Momus

#42. Publishers have realized that, unlike the previous time period, American teenagers are both smarter and require more topical material than they had been giving them before that. For one thing, they'll read thicker books. Besides, has anybody looked at the news or read the newspapers recently?

Tamora Pierce

#43. Here are condoms lined with a topical anesthetic for prolonged action. What a paradox. You don't feel a thing, but you can fuck for hours.

Chuck Palahniuk

#44. Representative democracy betrays the electorate when laws have no roots in the people but in oligarchies. Studies on the concept and modalities of direct democracy are therefore becoming more topical

Alfred-Maurice De Zayas

#45. When I think of folk music, I think of topical songs. And I don't write topical songs.

Ray Lamontagne

#46. Relevance is kind of a weird thing. If one does topical material, it makes sense to want to be relevant. But if someone talks about donut sprinkles, it's not quite as important. Unless the U.S. Supreme Court makes a decision outlawing donut sprinkles.

Brian Regan

#47. The comics that are just conversing with you up there and drawing on their own life, yeah, I guess so. I guess some do political humor, some do topical humor, but the ones that I like, the ones that are appealing to me, were guys who were just talking to you about their life.

Ray Romano

#48. What's most galvanizing for me is the opportunity to be topical and relevant and entertaining. That's the holy grail.

Kathryn Bigelow

#49. Anytime you open your mouth there's going to be someone who's put off. I try to deal with that by keeping the topical portions of my show brief. I realize that some people wish my comments were briefer.

John Hall

#50. I shoot for 'Extra' three times a week, and that's great for Las Vegas, too. In addition to interviewing stars who are here for shows, parties and premieres, I'll also get peoples' reactions to different news items and topical gossip.

Holly Madison

#51. Politics is topical - it's what's happening now, and we can either respond in the present or avoid it.

Hank Azaria

#52. Since the songs were written over a five-year period, I think these are little snapshots. Some people call it political or topical, but I think each song is self-contained. I think it fits together as a picture of the last half-decade of time.

Conor Oberst

#53. Painted time is a different zone. This is why I don't believe that a painting - although I've been accused of it many times now - can be truly topical. A painting's physicality gives it a different persistence and a different perception.

Luc Tuymans

#54. There are conspiracy theorists who think I was crafted in a boardroom. Because I'm so very relatable and so very topical and so very Tumblr.

Halsey

#55. Just a bullet a bag and a dream that's all I had now look at what I got

Saira Viola