Tragic Themes Quotes

If you are only moved by color relationships, you are missing the point. I am interested in expressing the big emotions - tragedy, ecstasy, doom.

Was there ever such stuff as great as part of Shakespeare? Only one must not say so! But what think you? - What? - Is there not sad stuff? What? - What?

The Greeks said very, very extreme things in their tragedies.

Wagner is a composer who has beautiful moments but awful quarter hours.

I love bummer songs.

Sad stories make good books

I'm not an abstractionist. I'm not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.

I really am not affected by the tragic aspects of my books.

I liked Hans Christian Andersen because the tales were so dark and tragic.

American folk songs were about tragedy, right? They were about suffering and tragedy, and a lot of my songs are about that, even though they were misunderstood.

In those early days, the important thing was the happy ending. I did not tolerate unhappy endings - for my heroines, anyway. And later on, I began to read things like 'Wuthering Heights,' and very, very unhappy endings would take place, so I changed my ideas completely and went in for the tragic, which I enjoyed.

I like the tragedies way more than the comedies because they're so universal.

I think American drama is at its best when it takes the domestic and makes it epic, like a Greek tragedy in the front room.

You're familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics?

I always really loved Russian literature, and I think Tolstoy's writing is full of a sense of melancholy and humanity, so it seems really modern.

As an undergraduate, I studied the Greek and Roman classics, and I went to graduate school in classics intending to work on the presentation of moral issues in various Greek and Roman tragedies.

If I had my choice in life I would have had the gifts of Tennessee Williams or Eugene O'Neill. Unfortunately my gifts lie in comedy and so comedy comes fairly easy to me and I occasionally have an idea for a very serious piece and I do it, but the ideas don't come that readily to me.

Not every novel that wants to be a tragedy gets to be one.

I don't write fantasy, I write reality. Also, my novels have roots to Greek tragedies and as such, there has to be tragedy.

Without explaining why, and, most of all, without naming other authors or books, I can only say my novels are influenced by love and death.