Vilayanur S. Ramachandran Quotes

There are few things as toxic as a bad metaphor. You can't think without metaphors.

The thing about metaphors is that, if you give them away, you give away the mystery.

I try not to be overly literal. When I'm writing songs, I write down a lot of words, and then I try to simplify it. I like to give people hints or words that make visual pictures for them.

Metaphor is not just the detection of patterns; it is the creation of patterns.

When an analogy is really singing, it's what you want it to be.

When I can't talk sense, I talk metaphor.

Look at almost any passage, and you'll find that a paragraph has five or six metaphors in it. It's not that the speaker is trying to be poetic, it's just that that's the way language works.

Word - that invisible dagger.

I don't like allegory.

The simile sets two ideas side by side; in the metaphor they become superimposed.

Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way.

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.

When you're telling stories, you are actually trying to illuminate some portion of the truth in an artful way. The story may immediately seem to be a lie, but it's like an impressionistic painting - you see the light and the color better than you would with a photo-realistic piece.

The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.

Some things in literature are inexplicable.

A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.

My fans have always loved my metaphors.

When you allegorize, you're gonna get everybody saved somehow.

Poems - crystallizations of the universal play of analogy, transparent objects which, as they reproduce the mechanism and the rotary motion of analogy, are waterspouts of new analogies.

Lyrics need to be good, but they don't need to be obvious right away.

The strangest thing that human speech and human writing can do is create a metaphor. That is an amazing leap, is it not?

A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances.

Metaphor lives a secret life all around us. We utter about six metaphors a minute.

There is no aspect of our experience not molded in some way by metaphor's almost imperceptible touch.