I've never written a book with an outline or a predetermined theme. It's only in retrospect that themes or subjects become identifiable. That's the fun of it: discovering what's next. I'm often surprised by plot developments I would not have dreamed of starting out, but that, in the course of the writing, come to seem inevitable.
I would like to do things like I did in Tanzania, going somewhere and exploring a theme and investigating as well as performing for those people.
One important theme is the extent to which one can ever correct an error, especially outside any frame of religious forgiveness. All of us have done something we regret - how we manage to remove that from our conscience, or whether that's even possible, interested me.
From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme.
I go online, and I love watching heavy metal bands and guitar players play heavy metal versions of the 'Zelda' theme, and people do all the 'Zelda' music, which is one of my favorite soundtracks.
What's become a big theme in my music is my dad as a narrative character. I never had the opportunity to understand our relationship in a more adult capacity. The unknown is great material for any creative outlet.
Just strengthening that theme that America is a place of opportunity and hoping to inspire people to fulfill those opportunities, and to want more, and to want better, and to see the places we can go. So many people identify with me because of the place that I come from.
The Puritans' sense of priorities in life was one of their greatest strengths. Putting God first and valuing everything else in relation to God was a recurrent Puritan theme.
An adaptation leads the cinema-goer to the original to find out what they're missing and if they already know the book, it can still illuminate a theme, a character, an idea.
I sang the 'Sunday Night Football' theme song two years in a row - my first part in American culture, although I still don't know anything about American football.
I actually went to NYU for six months, had some family issues that kind of set me back, and I couldn't afford to go anymore. That was the theme going on in my whole life, you know: money stopping me from whatever I wanted to do.
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.
While apartheid was in operation, the set-up was a gift for writers if you were looking for a big theme.
What I think of as 'freakonomics' is mostly storytelling around an idea - not a theme but an idea. I like ideas much more than themes. Themes are boring. Themes are, 'Wool is back,' but ideas are, 'Why is wool back?'
Travelling childhoods are a common theme among actors. Army kids, embassy kids, travelling salesmen, clergy. Thing is, you learn about behaviour, that different places are separated by behaviours which are culturally driven.
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.
