Theme Quotes - Page 20

• The first thing I learned was the theme from Peter Gunn.

  Pat Metheny

  Firsts, Peter

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• The theme is the theme of humiliation, which is the square root of sin, as opposed to the freedom from humiliation, and love, which is the square root of wonderful.

  Carson McCullers

  Squares, Roots, And Love

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• The AIDS epidemic has rolled back a big rotting log and revealed all the squirming life underneath it, since it involves, all at once, the main themes of our existence: sex, death, power, money, love, hate, disease and panic. No American phenomenon has been so compelling since the Vietnam War.

  Edmund White

  Sex, Hate, War

  States of Desire: Travels in Gay America "Afterword - AIDS: An American Epidemic" (1986)

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• I don't want to deal with big, grand themes in my stories; art has nothing to do with themes. When you deal with themes, you are not creating; you are lecturing.

  Tatyana Tolstaya

  Art, Creating, Stories

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• There is a common theme, though, in the stories I have told, which are usually associations of characters or families that are formed outside of a family circle.

  Gus Van Sant

  Family, Character, Circles

  "EXCLUSIVE: Gus Van Sant Talks Restless Blu-ray" by B.Alan Orange, movieweb.com. January 25, 2012.

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• I hear filmmakers saying, 'I wanted to make to make a film about this issue, or this theme,' but I never start like that.

  Andrea Arnold

  Issues, Film, Wanted

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• Beginning writers are often advised to 'write what you know,' and since I knew about quilters - their quirks, their inside jokes, their disputes and their generosity, their quarrels and their kindnesses - the lives of quilters became a natural subject for me. Quilting wove together my two themes as completely and effortlessly as I could have hoped.

  Jennifer Chiaverini

  Kindness, Writing, Two

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• A lot of the themes of my movies, the actual stories, come from tabloid stories.

  Errol Morris

  Movie, Stories, Tabloids

  "Errol Morris: 'The Thin Blue Line' would not have saved Randall Adams today" by Eric Kohn, www.indiewire.com. July 13, 2011.

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• I began to write a kind of waltz and in a little more than an hour I had the theme written.

  Maurice Jarre

  Writing, Littles, Kind

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• Themes recur again and again in my work.

  Eve Arnold

  Again And Again

  Eve Arnold (1976). “The Unretouched Woman”, Random House (NY)

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• We all perform our lives in a way. And the actor is a perfect metaphor to get at that theme of "how do we find our authentic selves?" And that we all - whether we're actors or not - perform ourselves. As a way of searching. As a way of fumbling around and trying to say, is this my voice? Is this who I am?

  Annette Bening

  Voice, Self, Who I Am

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• I knew I wanted to write on religious themes when I was a GI in World War II. I saw and experienced so much violence that I thought I could express my outrage best with music.

  Dave Brubeck

  Religious, War, Writing

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• 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

  Book, Writing, Trying

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• This is love: You stop bothering about the universal, the general, get sucked instead into the local and particular: When will I see her again? What shall we do today? Do you like these shoes? Theory and reflection are delicate old uncles bustled out of the way by the boisterous nephews action and desire. Themes evaporate, only plot remains.

  Glen Duncan

  Love, Uncles, Reflection

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• It was Sci-Fi and fantasy that got me reading, and Sci-Fi writers in particular have pack rat minds. They introduce all sorts of interesting themes and ideas into their books, and so for me it was a short leap to go from the fantasy and Sci-Fi genres to folklore, mythology, ancient history and philosophy. I did not read philosophy because I set out to become a philosopher; I read it because it looked interesting.

  Terry Pratchett

  Philosophy, Book, Reading

  Source: www.washingtonpost.com

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• Give me a theme," the little poet cried, "And I will do my part," "'Tis not a theme you need," the world replied; "You need a heart.

  Richard Watson Gilder

  Heart, Giving, Needs

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• A theme that appears repeatedly in the writings of the social critics of the second half of the 20th century is the sense of purposelessness that afflicts many people in modern society.

  Theodore Kaczynski

  Writing, People, Half

  The Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski (2005). “The Unabomber Manifesto: Industrial Society and Its Future”, p.28, Filiquarian Publishing, LLC.

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• I have been moving around all my life. Going to different schools, living in different houses, shedding old roles, assuming new ones. This way of life is as natural to me as staying in one place is for other people. I do variations on the theme. I return to places where I used to be. I find my old personas. I try them on. If they still fit, I wear them out to a party or a show. If they begin to restrict my movements, I take them off. I am a human being, capable of mimicking anything I see or remember or can imagine.

  Ellen Gilchrist

  Moving, Party, School

  Ellen Gilchrist (2013). “Falling Through Space”, p.27, Open Road Media

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• It is what makes conscious of the conditions and laws of observing which applied in this manner become a theme on its own. The activity of consciousness depending on the way the work itself proceeds, becomes the subject of my attention this way and it is precisely because of this voyeuristic attitude toward the own observation and experience of the subject that the conscious analytic dimension in the work shows.

  Antoni Tapies

  Attitude, Law, Attention

  "Tàpies, Werke auf Papier 1943 - 2003" by Antoni Tapies, Kunsthalle Emden, edited by Achim Sommer, Altana, (p. 30), 2004.

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• I worked a great deal then, as you can only do on a set theme, absolved from the obligation to find a new fact, a new subject every day.

  Rico Lebrun

  Facts, Obligation, Deals

  University of Southern California, Rico Lebrun (1961). “Rico Lebrun: Paintings and Drawings 1946-1961”

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• I think of music a lot when I paint. The theme of it to a degree is music. So instead of literally putting in music or literally putting in a musical instrument, I use only a hint of the instrument, but the brocaded pattern is like a line of Bach because of its order and the leaves going up are like passages from Vivaldi, and the emphasis on drapery is where the sound comes.

  Nelson Shanks

  Thinking, Order, Musical

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• Composition in photography is almost as varied as composition in music or words -- melodic or atonal, safe or daring -- and can enhance subject, theme, and style. Every photograph you take involves you in some compositional decision, even if this is simply where to set up the camera or when to press the button.

  Michael Langford

  Photography, Decision, Style

  Michael Langford (2000). “Basic Photography”, p.7, Taylor & Francis

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• Incorporating in their colorful, slashing, superbly readable pages, the major themes of the "left" opposition under Walpole, these libertarian tracts, emerging first in the form of denunciations of standing armies in the reign of William III, left an indelible imprint on the "country" mind everywhere in the English-speaking world.

  Bernard Bailyn

  Country, Army, Mind

  Bernard Bailyn (2017). “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution: Fiftieth Anniversary Edition”, p.36, Harvard University Press

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• Improvisation sometimes seemed more like jazz than acting, like verbal jazz, with the actors playing a theme back and forth, and then introducing another theme, incorporating it, somehow trying to work their way all together to a meaning of some kind, or at least a conclusion.

  Alan Arkin

  Trying, Acting, Together

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• One theme of what I've been writing has been to get people to understand that "apolitical" means "you lose." It doesn't mean you live a utopian life free of politicians' influence. The destruction of the public domain is the clearest example, but it will only be the first.

  Lawrence Lessig

  Writing, Mean, People

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