Ultimately, your theme will find you. You don't have to go looking for it.

Who but an English professor would threaten to kill a duck a day and hold up a goose as an example?

One of the nice things about our marriage, at least to my way of thinking, is that my wife and I no longer have to argue every thing through. We each know what the other will say, and so the saying becomes an unnecessary formality. No doubt some marriage counselor would explain to us that our problem is a failure to communicate, but to my way of thinking we've worked long and hard to achieve this silence, Lily's and mine, so fraught with mutual understanding.

Movies have to handle time very efficiently. They're about stringing scenes together in the present. Novels aren't necessarily about that.

To expect reason is where the fallacy lies.

A lot of my characters in all of my books have a self-destructive urge. They'll do precisely the thing that they know is wrong, take a perverse delight in doing the wrong thing.

Ultimately, your theme will find you. You don't have to go looking for it.