I like to write about painting because I think visually. I see my writing as blocks of color before it forms itself. I think I also care about painting because I'm not musical. Painting to me is not a metaphor for writing, but something people do that can never be reduced to words.
A. S. Byatt
I find the attempt to find things out, which scientists are possessed by, to be as human as breathing, or feeding, or sex. And so the science has to be in the novels as science and not just as metaphors.
As a young physician in the mid-'80s, caring for people who had contracted H.I.V., I lost two of my patients to suicide at a time when the virus was doing very little harm to them. I have always thought of them as having been killed by a metaphor, by the burden of secrecy and shame associated with the disease.
Abraham Verghese
The cloud, for a while more of a metaphor than a giant business, is re-ordering all sorts of industries.
Adam Lashinsky
The Holocaust is a central event in many people's lives, but it also has become a metaphor for our century. There cannot be an end to speaking and writing about it. Besides, in Israel, everyone carries a biography deep inside him.
Aharon Appelfeld
I don't eschew autobiographical writing, but I'm not interested in mine to be so straightforward. The things that tend to move me the most are often those that I have to figure out its meaning for myself. The human being's ability to make a metaphor to describe a human experience is just really cool.
Aimee Bender
I don't really know what it is about vampires that makes them such a powerful symbol, metaphor, whatever in people's consciousness. But I do know they're tremendously powerful. I mean, there's a vampire on 'Sesame Street.' And Count Chocula. I don't know why it's so powerful.
Alan Ball
It's easy to look at the vampires as a metaphor for any feared or misunderstood group. It's also easy to look at them as a metaphor for a shadow organization that says one thing and has a completely different agenda on their mind, and anybody who gets in their way, they just get rid of them. Does that sound familiar?
Vampires are total sexual metaphors; there's just no way around that.
It used to be that readers were relegated because they considered themselves far above society, and so the metaphor of the ivory tower developed. Now there's still this idea that the reader doesn't take part in the social game and in politics, the res publica, but for other reasons: he doesn't do it because he's not making any money.
Alberto Manguel
When I discovered metaphor and what it meant, I got really excited. That was what really pushed me through into music.
Aldous Harding
The vampire movies I embraced as a kid used vampirism as a metaphor that expressed deep sadness and a lot of human qualities.
Alexandra Cassavetes
Our home, just like our garden, evolves. We experiment, try out different things and new colors until we feel content. Try to keep the metaphor of home as garden in your consciousness.
Alexandra Stoddard
In 'Gravity,' nearly everything is a metaphor for the main character. The way I tend to approach a film is that character and background are equally important; one informs the other. Here, Sandra Bullock is caught between Earth and the void of the universe, just floating there in between. We use the debris as a metaphor for adversity.
Alfonso Cuaron
A tendency to make metaphorical connections is an occupational hazard for those of us who write.
Alice McDermott
I think that I do feel that my nature is to express what this self, this particular self at this time, experiences in the world. And that is so organic - I use this metaphor a lot but I'll use it again - it's like a pine tree producing pine cones, or a blackberry bush producing blackberries - it's just what happens with this being, now.
Alice Walker
My parents were both storytellers. They always spoke with metaphorical richness.
As adults, when we attend to something in the world we are vividly conscious of that particular thing, and we shut out the surrounding world. The classic metaphor is that attention is like a spotlight, illuminating one part of the world and leaving the rest in darkness.
Alison Gopnik
My husband was 50; I was in my late 30s. We had lived adulthoods that did not include infants, except as metaphors. And then, like so many in today's America, we had a baby in later life.
Alissa Quart
I had very literal parents and I wanted to survive with metaphor and art, and there was a real sense of shame around it.
Amanda Palmer
Instinct is still important, but now I can easily identify problems like cliches and mixed metaphors, and I have a broader palette to work off of.
Religious speech is extreme, emotional, and motivational. It is anti-literal, relying on metaphor, allusion, and other rhetorical devices, and it assumes knowledge within a community of believers.
You know those bumpers in the two lanes when you go bowling? I go out there with two of them, metaphorically, every day.
If there's a silver bullet in the battle to recapture Albany, it is the re-engagement of our citizens. This capital has become a physical metaphor for the isolation and alienation of our people.
You write three pages over six hours, and you don't feel like you've gotten anywhere, but if you've done a beautiful metaphor or a lovely sentence, or you finally got to some moment you wanted, then that's worth it. Then you can close your computer and get a little relief.
If what you're writing is genuine, regardless of whether it sounds cliche or people wouldn't necessarily think it's the most brilliant metaphor in the world, it's always important to be genuine with what you're writing; at least, that's how I feel.
Right now, I'm standing behind the glass, and I guess that's a metaphor for how my life will be going forward.
I think people's perception of a rich girl is literal, but metaphorically I embrace it as being rich in love, spirit, joy and religion. So it's not about money.
A tree is such a rich metaphor in a million beautiful ways. You can consider a tree growing and consider its connectedness to all things above and under the ground.
I remember from my father's funeral that the minister kept using a metaphor about life of a prism. And I took that away like a cherished image.
There is something about the way that Greek poets, say Aeschylus, use metaphor that really attracts me. I don't think I can imitate it, but there's a density to it that I think I'm always trying to push towards in English.
The vampires have always been metaphors for me. They've always been vehicles through which I can express things I have felt very, very deeply.
We all perform our lives in a way. And the actor is a perfect metaphor to get at that theme of 'how do we find our authentic selves?' And that we all - whether we're actors or not - perform ourselves. As a way of searching. As a way of fumbling around and trying to say, is this my voice? Is this who I am?
The poet, being an imitator like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects - things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. The vehicle of expression is language - either current terms or, it may be, rare words or metaphors.
I think that we give the impression, to carry on your metaphor, that we go a little faster than we actually do. I'm fairly lazy so I'm always interested in slowing down.
I've always been comfortable being the first person at a party, metaphorically speaking - being the first person on the dance floor, saying, 'This is where it's happening, people, and if you don't think so, that's cool, but I think you're missing out.' That's my general philosophy, and it's served me pretty well.
It's possible to take that as a personal metaphor and then multiply it to a people, a race, a sex, a time. If we can keep this thing going long enough, if we can survive and teach what we know, we'll make it.
No one bothered reading the books and understanding - and again, I'm not being high-falutin' about it - but I think our books are great literature with great metaphors of real life dealing with fears and hopes.
I think rap in general allows you to be more lyrically expressive. It's a lot easier to state your identity, as opposed to with a guitar making all these weird metaphors.
Metaphorically speaking, it's easy to bump into one another on the journey from A to B and not even notice. People should take time to notice, enjoy and help each other.
The doctor I would want for myself or for anyone else I cared about would be one who understands that disease is more than just a clinical entity; it is an experience and a metaphor, with a message that must be listened to.
Sports is a metaphor for overcoming obstacles and achieving against great odds. Athletes, in times of difficulty, can be important role models.
Their scrambled attention spans struck me as a metaphor for the way we get our doses of reality these days.
What life throws at you - you just have to learn how to hit it, which is a baseball metaphor. The ball's outside, you hit to the right. You don't let them go by.
Some of my favorite media is the still cartoon that you can sit and study. You can get amazing metaphors across really quickly. I'm in awe of a Charles Schulz.
There's this poet named Walter Benton, I really like his stuff. He always uses landscapes as a metaphor for the female body.
Our songs aren't metaphorical, normally: they're literal in their interpretation.
Everybody says, 'I want to change,' but they're not willing to pay the price of it. That was the metaphor of 'Life's Golden Ticket'... Life is some kind of a ride, and if you want that ride to be exhilarating and amazing, you've got to pay to get in. And the price is a willingness to change above and beyond what most people will do.
I don't really have a metaphor for how I write, but it kinda feels like chipping away at a big dark object that I can't really see.
The Cemetery of Forgotten Books is a metaphor, not just for books but for ideas, for language, for knowledge, for beauty, for all the things that make us human, for collecting memory.
