Metaphorical Representation Quotes

I hope readers will think that 'The Thing About Life' is beautifully patterned, a tapestry.

Universal history is the history of a few metaphors.

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

Art is not supposed to change the world, to change practical things, but to change perceptions. Art can change the way we see the world. Art can create an analogy.

I think it was more personal, but I certainly tried to adapt certain concepts of Surrealism.

They said, 'You have a blue guitar, / You do not play things as they are.' / The man replied, 'Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.'

When you write a roman a clef, there is a tendency on the part of the reader to wonder how much of this is true, how much invented.

There's a little book I'm thinking of writing - "Swan Song" is what I shall call it. The song of the dying. And my book will be incense burnt at the deathbed of this society, damned with the damnation of its own impotence.

Sarah Cooper sounds like a character on 'The O.C.,' who was written out in season two, and it's like she moved into my body and gentrified my whole personality.

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a mentor, a teacher, a guidepost, a counsellor.

I really love horror novels, horror films, that are pointing at deeper ideas and thematic meaning. It's a way of thinking about films differently; that's what I think I like the most about it. I love the fact that's it's pointing at a more mysterious world - that the world is more of a mysterious place than we tend to let ourselves believe.

If the Prodigal Son's a parable, and if Adam and Eve are metaphors, then maybe God is just figure of speech.

Allegories, when well chosen, are like so many tracks of light in a discourse, that make everything about them clear and beautiful.

The worldview implied by literary fiction is complex and ambiguous, trying to be faithful to the complexity and ambiguity of life.

Occasionally, you'll get a 'District 9,' a film that is politically charged, but there is nothing going on beneath the surface with a lot of horror films. They are not about anything.

In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows.

To put down an ideogram of a table so that people will recognize it as a table is not the work of a painter, but to sense it for a moment as a magic carpet with a leg hanging down at each corner is the beginning of a painter's imagination.

Books are not life, only its ashes.

Virginia Woolf's literature really transformed my own ideas about how to formally represent the passage of time and how time affects us. Specifically, the benchmarks are 'Mrs. Dalloway,' 'To the Lighthouse' and 'Orlando,' all of which have time as a central conceit.

Have you considered that the Bible, like all religious doctrine, may be allegorical and symbolic, to direct us toward one holy entity of love, as opposed to a simplistic litiginous text to direct the behavior of human beings?

You can’t bring an unwritten place to life without losing something substantial. Manila is the cradle, the graveyard, the memory. The Mecca, the Cathedral, the bordello. The shopping mall, the urinal, the discotheque. I’m hardly speaking in metaphor. It’s the most impermeable of cities. How does one convey all that?

I said the photograph isn't what was photographed, it's something else. It's about transformation. And that's what it is.

Art—the meaning of the pattern of our common actions in reality. The cloth-of-gold that hides behind the sackcloth of reality, forced out by the pain of human memory.

I've spoken often of how the fantasy genre is able to, with the greatest freedom among all the genres, take a metaphor and make it real. But of course that's only the starting point.

What's been lost is allowing cinema to be artful, playful, to have ambiguity, to have form, to be contemplative, to wish to be art. This slightly timeless approach to reality, like Chekhov in literature, where you look at all humanity and try to find what's transcendent.