Stories, as much as we like to talk about them, retrospectively, as emanations of theme or worldview or intention, occur primarily as technical objects when they’re being written. Or at least they do for me. They’re the result of thousands of decisions made at speed during revision.
As a species, we tend to live in environments where our own artifacts dominate. The way we shape our environment and are in turn shaped by it is a key theme in my fiction – indeed, it’s a key part of a great deal of science fiction.
If there’s a theme to where I’m at in my life, it’s that ‘warts and all’ is actually my superpower. Just like you, I’m messed up and I’m capable. I’m this and that.
One of my favorite songs from the album is a song called ‘For Better or Worse,’ and it’s basically about unconditional love, which is, I’d say, an ongoing theme in my personal life.
Diplomacy is like jazz: endless variations on a theme.
In a story, you have to have a theme and an angle, you have to have a beginning, middle and an end. You have to have a defining moment and kick it to death. You gotta be able to recognize that, by the way. It probably takes experience.
I like to create what I call ‘tablescapes.’ It’s so much more fun when you organize your table around a theme, don’t you think?
Ultimately, your theme will find you. You don’t have to go looking for it.
The moment at which music reveals its true nature is contained in the ancient exercise of the theme with variations. The complete mystery of music is explained right there.
If somebody ever says something is a mature theme, it’s bound to not be. I mean, you shouldn’t fall for that. You can make it sound mature, but anything that’s about being mature is pretty immature.
The main question in drama, the way I was taught, is always, ‘What does the protagonist want?’ That’s what drama is. It comes down to that. It’s not about theme, it’s not about ideas, it’s not about setting, but what the protagonist wants.
The first thing I learned was the theme from Peter Gunn.
I always think it’s important to choose your initial theme very carefully because you’re going to be married to it for a long time. You might have to generate an hour’s worth of music from a very short, little piece of theme.
Composers in the old days used to keep strictly to the base of the theme, as their real subject. Beethoven varies the melody, harmony and rhythms so beautifully.
I feel like now fashion is just part of how I think about everything. When I send out a mood board to our contributors every month about our monthly theme, there are photos from our fashion shows, but there are also film stills and album art.
In Japan, after having lost World War II, the hierarchy that used to exist in the society, from the rich to the poor, has been flattened, especially by the winners, by Americans. As a Japanese artist debuting in America, I really had to bring that kind of theme into the work.
De Palma’s great theme, obsessively reiterated, is betrayal.
I love that as a theme for women: Stop standing by! You’ve got to make stuff happen! You’ve got to create your own world because if you let other people do it, they’re going to just screw you.
If there’s an enduring theme in my work, it’s probably the effects of class on American life.
We weren’t raised Muslim – we were born Muslim. I didn’t go to a Muslim school, but it was just the theme song. It was ambient.
As an actor, I’m attracted to drama; as a director, it’s humor – because it’s the story of my life, and I can’t be that serious about it. Being alone is a big theme in all my movies, both as a director and as an actress.
Consciousness – that, to me, is the theme of the modern novel.
The pull of history has been a strong theme in my life as a novelist.
Close your eyes and place your finger on a map. Wherever it lands, that’s the theme of the evening. So many times we settle for routine dishes. This forces you to try new cuisines.
If there is any sense of order to the universe, acting is what I am meant to do. I’m not manufactured. I know acting isn’t real, that it’s temporary. If there is any theme to the roles I play, it is emotional vulnerability and availability.
All I ever wanted to do was make things. My whole life has been a constant evolution on that theme.
To say ‘A High Wind in Jamaica’ is a novel about children who are abducted by pirates is to make it seem like a children’s book. But that’s completely wrong; its theme is actually how heartless children are.
Later on in my life, it became a big theme: just being okay and comfortable to take the risk and to have really thick skin and realize not everybody is going to love your product. Get over it, and if you believe in it, keep going forward.
Judaism is an intellectually based religion, and the single most important theme is that of study.
A theme that has always interested me is how women express anger, how women express violence. That is very much part of who women are, and it’s so unaddressed. A vast amount of literature deals with cycles of violence about men, antiheroes. Women lack that vocabulary.
I’ve always thought abstractly – through theme and variations rather than narrative.
I hear filmmakers saying, ‘I wanted to make to make a film about this issue, or this theme,’ but I never start like that.
I’ve always been a fan of issues around race and racialism, and I’ve loved playing with it. People act as though it isn’t an issue, but it’s a recurring theme in our lives globally.
The best diet for overall health, and specifically for heart, brain, and cancer risk reduction, is a diet that’s aggressively low in carbohydrates with an abundance of healthful fat, and this is the central theme of ‘Grain Brain.’
If you’re playing with a number of people, there are all sorts of textures, all kinds of possibilities you can get into. So why just play a theme together and then take solos?
So ‘Nier Automata’ feels like a story about androids but no, the main theme of ‘Automata’ is human.
I don’t know why my brain has kept all the words to the Gilligan’s Island theme song and has deleted everything about triangles.
I like the scene in the first ‘Scream’ movie where Sidney gets up, and dusk is falling, and she’s looking out at the hills of Santa Rosa, there where it was filmed, and that’s where you sort of hear her theme being played out. I always liked that moment because, to me, it became more than just a horror movie.
There is one universal truth: All women, all over the world, want to look beautiful. That is always the theme of my designs.
It’s a big theme throughout my music to just embrace everything about your own mind and to always feel powerful. It’s not just a feminine thing, but for men, too, whether they feel weak, or strong or crazy or reclusive. I want everyone to feel powerful no matter what little beasts they have in their head.
There is a theme that runs through my work, and that is: the toxic property of keeping secrets.
If you go to a theme park, there will be so many rides. You will get an exciting experience in each of them. Like that, every film is an experience that entertains you. Some films will touch your heart. Some will touch you emotionally. There is nothing more than that.
With all the weird surroundings of outer space the basic underlying theme of the show is a philosophical approach to man’s relationship to woman. There are both sexes in the crew, in fact, the first officer is a woman.
I always really enjoyed Edge’s entrance theme. Also Stone Cold. WWE once asked me in an interview, if I had to change my entrance music, whose would I choose, and I said Edge. So they created a video of me using that song, and I was like, ‘I’m in love.’
I can sing every single word of Honky Tonk’s theme song. He was great. He might not be that cruiserweight-style wrestler or a Bret Hart-type of wrestler, but I thought he was great. He was such an over-the-top character, and it was a character on the peripheral of wrestling.
My whole life has been one theme of self-sacrifice for my investors.
My favorite thing to do as a kid was pretend I was in the opening credits of a sitcom. As the theme song would play, I’d look up at the imaginary camera and smile as my name would flash on the screen.
Then a friend of Jim’s suggested we make a theme song to explain the story, and this is where the Mads came from. Josh and I wrote it into the theme song.
To some degree, I was very dubious of the ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ idea – taking a theme park ride and turning into a film – even though they seemed to end up being quite fun films.
Why is it that I can remember so easily the lyrics to the opening theme song of ‘Gilligan’s Island?’ Why do I remember these trivial things, and I can’t remember the names of important collaborators?
The show is not so clean cut in terms of good and bad. That is the theme that runs through the show. Loki is taking down the TVA, but is it the right decision?
I think that’s a huge theme in superhero books across the board: When you have this massive power, how do you use it responsibly? When do you intervene? Those are the big questions.
When I got to Florida, I was a British kid, but I was also an Indian kid: a brown kid with an English accent. Talk about being an outsider. And that’s become the theme of a lot of the stuff I write about.
