Julianna Baggott Quotes

My secrets must be poetic to be believable.

Being a literature major, you know, I'm very familiar with the ways symbolism is used in our sort of mythic tales of society, so anyone who is consciously trying to pull that off I think is really interesting and clearly very smart.

To me, a story can be both concrete and abstract, or a concrete story can hold abstractions. And abstractions are things that really can't be said so well with words.

A myth is far truer than a history, for a history only gives a story of the shadows, whereas a myth gives a story of the substances that cast the shadows.

I usually don't like to 'spoon feed' my audience, because I grew up idolizing story tellers who tell stories using symbolism, so it was in my nature to do the same.

The myth does not point to a fact; the myth points beyond facts to something that informs the fact

By the golden chain Homer meant nothing else than the sun.

I've always said fantasy is sort of 'stealth philosophy'.

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.

The story of Little Blue Riding Hood is true. Only the color has been changed to prevent an investigation.

You may name a bronze statue 'Liberty,' or a painted figure in a city hall 'Commerce,' or a marble form in a temple 'Athene' or 'Venus;' but what is really there is only a representation of a single woman.

If you see the sunset, does it have to mean something? If you hear the birds singing does it have to have a message?

My work should be seen as poetry.

Philosophers are best able to understand properly the allegorical passages of the Koran on the basis of their logical training. There is no religious stipulation that all such passages have to be interpreted literally.

There's a lot of places where the image of a cube as a thing of power is pertinent. I don't know why that is. I don't have any mythic explanation for it, but it seems to work for people.

Good sci-fi and fantasy use fantastical situations to represent real-life issues. It really is all a metaphor for what we all go through as humans.

I love fairy tales because I think that behind fairy tales, there is always a meaning.

We often find far more power in a symbol than in something that is an an actuality.

With the transcendent or supernatural, they help us contextualize our own lives while we are here on this earth. On a narrative level, as a storyteller, they are a wonderful tool and technique by which to explore those hopes, those fears, those existential dilemmas that we all face from time to time.

When it comes to the lyrics, I write about my own perception of things and use characters for that.

Fiction allows us to both evade truth and to approach it - or, rather, it's fiction that allows us to 'construct' our world. It's haunted by the unimaginable and the unspeakable.

When you're writing about superpowers, you're writing about power. When you're writing about immortals, you're writing about mortality.

Reading 'Search Sweet Country' is like reading a dream, and indeed, at times, it feels like the magical landscapes of writers like the Nigerian Ben Okri or the Mozambican Mia Couto.

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

Whereas if you were writing an op-ed piece or an essay, somebody would be asking, "What's your point?" With poetry you can stay in a moment for as long as you want. Poetry is about metaphor, about a thing standing in for something else. It's the thing that opens out to something else. What that something else is changes for readers. So what's on the page - it falls away.