Serious Subjects Quotes

• When you don't talk down to your audience, then they can grow with you. I give them a lot of credit to be able to hang with me this long, because I've gone through a lot of changes, but they've allowed me to grow, and thus we can tackle some serious subjects and try to just be better human beings, all of us.

  Prince

  Long, Giving, Trying

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• I wanted to catch the problem of consumption, waste, poor people eating what we throw away, which is a big subject. But I didn't want to become a sociologue, an ethnographe, a serious thinker. I thought I should be free, even in a documentary which has a very serious subject.

  Agnes Varda

  People, Want, Waste

  Interview with Sheila Heti, believermag.com. October 1, 2009.

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• Every serious man in dealing with really serious subjects carefully avoids writing. ... There does not exist, nor will there ever exist, any writing of mine dealing with this subject.

  Plato

  Writing, Men, Serious Man

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• Animal rights is a serious subject, but I do my best to find humor where I can.

  Karen Dawn

  Animal, Rights, I Can

  "Animal Advocate and Author Karen Dawn: The Welfare of Animals and the Earth". Interview with Barbi Twins, www.marandapleasantmedia.com.

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• I think [director] Malcolm Lee is a real master at being able to make you laugh while bringing serious subject-matter, so the movie doesn't hinge on silliness, but on real life.

  Ice Cube

  Real, Thinking, Laughing

  Interview with Kam Williams, newsblaze.com. April 13, 2016.

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• Animal rights is a serious subject, but I do my best to find humor where I can, and I have some great help: there are almost two hundred cartoons included in the book, including dozens from the brilliant Bizarro strip.

  Karen Dawn

  Book, Animal, Two

  "Animal Advocate and Author Karen Dawn: The Welfare of Animals and the Earth". Interview with Barbi Twins, www.marandapleasantmedia.com.

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• I do think that this represents a kind of shift towards myth, a recovery of myth, largely through the popularity of writers like Philip Pullman. Somehow myths have returned as a serious subject. It used to be scorned...really scorned. It was part of a nursery tradition, and it was also rather tainted - but not in an immovable way - by the association with right-wing ideologies after the World Wars.

  Marina Warner

  War, Recovery, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Politics is the only serious. subject that men think themselves qualified to act upon without any previous education or instruction whatever. If it happened to be astronomy, or botany, or medicine, or law, he would never be allowed to work in any of these arts, or to take a decisive part in the history of any one of these sciences without having, at least, acquired: the A B C of it; but the awful fact of politics is that we do not take the trouble seriously to understand the political situation.

  Hugh Price Hughes

  Art, Men, Thinking

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• If my work is pornography, so what? I don't have any moral compunction about pornography. Any feelings I have about it are purely stylistic... I don't see why it should be excluded as a serious subject.

  David Salle

  Feelings, Moral, Should

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• The grand stye arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.

  Matthew Arnold

  Poetry, Simplicity, Noble

  On Translating Homer: Last Words (1862)

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• Real writers - serious writers with serious subjects, who earn their living at it - all seem to write in small rooms with that knotty-pine 1974 look on the top-floor rear of their houses. Rooms with views.

  Peter York

  Real, Writing, Views

  "Writers' rooms: Peter York" by Peter York, www.theguardian.com. April 10, 2009.

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• Unidentified flying objects are a very serious subject which we must study fully. We appeal to all viewers to send us details of strange flying craft seen over territories of the Soviet Union. This is a serious challenge to science and we need the help of all Soviet citizens.

  Felix Ziegel

  Flying, Challenges, Details

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• The funny thing is that the process of coming up with an idea for a column or a 'Candid Camera' sequence is essentially the same thing. I just live my life with eyes and ears perhaps a little bit wider open than some people. Whatever bothers me or seems off kilter or in need of parody-or on a serious subject, in need of examination-in the past I had done a sequence about it. Now I write a column about it.

  Peter Funt

  Art, Eye, Writing

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• To a naturalist nothing is indifferent; the humble moss that creeps upon the stone is equally interesting as the lofty pine which so beautifully adorns the valley or the mountain: but to a naturalist who is reading in the face of the rocks the annals of a former world, the mossy covering which obstructs his view, and renders indistinguishable the different species of stone, is no less than a serious subject of regret.

  James Hutton

  Regret, Reading, Humble

  James Hutton (1997). “Theory of the Earth: With Proofs and Illustrations, in Four Parts”, p.46, Geological Society of London

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• I approach serious subjects, and I like to have the good guys win and have the parents among the good guys

  Caroline B. Cooney

  Winning, Parent, Guy

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• People complain that the religious ground is unsure who have never compelled themselves to examine it with a tithe of the care spent on a contract; but they have taken current suggestions in a dreamy and hypnotised way. They will not attend, they will not force themselves to attend, gravely to the gravest things.... they read everything in a vagrant, browsing fashion. They turn on the most serious subjects the holiday, seaside, newspaper habit of mind

  Peter Forsyth

  Religious, Fashion, Taken

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• The combination of a frivolous form and a serious subject immediately unmasks the truth about our dramas.

  Milan Kundera

  Drama, Form, Combination

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• When you're dealing with serious subjects, there is a pressure to be absolutely sure that you know what you're doing.

  John Oliver

  Pressure, Knows, Serious

  "A very funny Englishman in New York". Interview with Hermione Hoby, www.theguardian.com. July 23, 2011.

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• While I would agree that I write about serious subjects, and that they're not necessarily the most pleasant subjects or even the most pleasant people, as a writer I just think about the humorous aspects of these things - that's what keeps me going when I'm writing a story.

  Ann Beattie

  Humorous, Writing, Thinking

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• I don't think I'm morbid by nature. Serious writers have always written about serious subjects. Lighthearted material doesn't appeal to me, and I don't read it. I think I'm a realist, with a realistic sensibility of history and the tragedy of history.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Thinking, Tragedy, Realist

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