William Butler Yeats Quotes

Each time I'm starting to work on a film, even if I love to settle the plot in the real world, I start to think about the plot as a fairy tale, or a dream, or a nightmare... As if it was the best way to tell the truth about characters or narration, instead of realism.

Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.

Man's ultimate concern must be expressed symbolically, because symbolic language alone is able to express the ultimate.

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

My secrets must be poetic to be believable.

A poet must be a psychologist, but a secret one: he should know and feel the roots of phenomena but present only the phenomena themselves in full bloom or as they fade away.

It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.

I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts.

All that passes is raised to the dignity of expression; all that happens is raised to the dignity of meaning. Everything is either symbol or parable.

You can be very honest without telling the truth, at least in art.

Fiction accesses a certain kind of truth through artifice. I love to create worlds that operate on their own terms.

Speech is like cloth of Arras opened and put abroad, whereby the imagery doth appear in figure; whereas in thoughts they lie but as packs.

Metaphors are an interesting example of creating magic in prose.

It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word

Art is the expression of imagination, not the reproduction of reality.

I don't believe that you can possibly separate expression from thought in an imaginative work. The better a thing is expressed, the more completely it is thought.

Art. Its definitions are legion, its meanings multitudinous, its importance often debated. But amid the many contradictory definitions of art, one has always stood the test of time, from the Upanishads in the East, to Michelangelo in the West: art is the perception and depiction of the sublime, the transcendent, the beautiful, the spiritual.

Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.

Poetry is a kind of ingenious nonsense.

All religious expression is symbolism.

I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish.

Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.

All I try to do is portray Indians as we are, in creative ways. With imagination and poetry. I think a lot of Native American literature is stuck in one idea: sort of spiritual, environmentalist Indians. And I want to portray everyday lives. I think by doing that, by portraying the ordinary lives of Indians, perhaps people learn something new.

Art does the same things dreams do. We have a hunger for dreams and art fulfills that hunger. So much of real life is a disappointment. That's why we have art.