Quotes About Theme

Looking for art, the theme gets lost. Finding the theme is finding art.

The zodiac's twelve signs are said to represent powerful archetypes that are universal in theme.

This is the news theme, but it sounds like pure Hollywood entertainment. It sounds like E.T. on a horse being chased by Darth Vader, which is something I'd love to see.

As a science fiction writer, it's hard to think of a more stirring theme than the origin and ultimate destiny of life in the universe.

I'm a theological writer mistaken for a political writer. My theme is grace versus karma.

I'm not good at narrative; I'm really a gag writer, and that comes from being in the newspaper comic strip world for a while in college. What I do is I just write tons of jokes, then I sort them out in terms of quality and then pick the best of the jokes and then try to form them into a plot. If I get a good theme going, I feel lucky.

While apartheid was in operation, the set-up was a gift for writers if you were looking for a big theme.

I'm not a writer that writes every day. I just kind of have ideas. I jot them down when I have them, and when I have enough, I just start. And for me, I start more around noon, and I'm all about feeling. Once there's a theme, I can't not write.

Character in decay is the theme of the great bulk of superior fiction.

Whatever universal masterpiece of tomorrow may be wrought from phantasm or terror will owe its acceptance rather to a supreme workmanship than to a sympathetic theme. Yet who shall declare the dark theme a positive handicap? Radiant with beauty, the Cup of the Ptolemies was carven of onyx.

Popular authors do not and apparently cannot appreciate the fact that true art is obtainable only by rejecting normality and conventionality in toto, and approaching a theme purged utterly of any usual or preconceived point of view.

I'm also working on a track for Howard Hewett, and a theme for a new NPR show.

The theme of exile is attractive to me, because it's sort of like the family business. Not just music, but travel.

Every story I write starts with a dilemma or a theme. Once I am convinced that this is the issue that is perturbing my thoughts, I start to look for characters capable of representing it.

Love is the ultimate theme, but it's not just for women.

The Aunts put their arms about one another so that their faces were cheek to cheek, and from this doublehead they gazed up at Steerpike with a row of four equidistant eyes. There was no reason why there should not have been forty, or four hundred of them. It so happened that only four had been removed from a dead and endless frieze whose inexhaustible and repetitive theme was forever, eyes, eyes, eyes.

When sex is necessary for the plot of a book, or a character development, then I don't shy away from it. Why should I?

At least twice a week, I pause in the rush of work and have a meeting with myself. (If I were part of a team, I'd call a team meeting.) I ask myself, again, of the project: "What is this damn thing about?" Keep refining your understanding of the theme; keep narrowing it down.

The Song of the Assassin," the theme of which was hunting. As we listened, it became clear that the objective of that hunting was to get the heads of the "Yankee nom," which means, roughly, "Yankee bastard." The refrain, over and over, was "Hunting American noms." The word the performers used for Americans' heads was not mauri but daegari, which is used only to refer to animals.

Ah, but sir,' said Lascelles, 'it is precisely by passing judgments upon other people's work and pointing out their errors that readers can be made to understand your own opinions better. It is the easiest thing in the world to turn a review to one's own ends. One only need mention the book once or twice and for the rest of the article one may develop one's theme just as one chuses. It is, I assure you, what every body else does.

It's always the story that interests me.

I believe that a writer should never attempt a contemporary theme or a very precise topography. Otherwise people are immediately going to find mistakes. Or if they don't find them, they're going to look for them, and if they look for them, they'll find them. That's why I prefer to have my stories take place in somewhat indeterminate places and many years ago.

That's because the theme of the innocent man being accused, I feel, provides the audience with a greater sense of danger. It's easier for them to identify with him than with a guilty man on the run. I always take the audience into account.

The central theme of the Bible is salvation, and the central personality of the Bible is Christ.