Dave Morris Quotes

'Arcadia' is obviously a play that's got interesting things in it that are perhaps quite hard to grasp.

I see 'Hansel and Gretel' as a breakthrough book for me, and one of the reasons is because I started to apply meaning to the hidden details.

I'm not interested in gothic storytelling or the horrific for its own sake. I'm always interested in it as a way of getting at larger ideas or important meaning. And you don't see that as much as you'd think in the history of horror cinema. A lot of times, it's scariness for scariness' own sake.

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

I don't despise 'Don Quixote,' but it is a book I don't... get. I'll have to come back it. Maybe there'll be a gateway story that opens it up for me; that happened for me with 'Paradise Lost' and the 'His Dark Materials' trilogy.

Truth may be stranger than fiction on a plot and narrative basis, but fiction can investigate tone in a way that things based on a true story can't.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

I'm an old English major from way back, so I do have fun tearing apart texts and trying to find the hidden secrets and the subtexts in there.

There's a side that I want to do just like really retarded arty films like parody, pretentious art films that kind of are supposed to have some deep meaning.

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

Most of the names in my books have secondary meaning. Sometimes they foreshadow; sometimes they tell you about the character's origin or back story.

One of the biggest problems in literature is the lack of subtlety.

Everything in this world has a hidden meaning.

With Shakespeare, the hard work is to find out why he said it and how it can relate to the audience.

The drawing and the crafting of the story are fun, but it's the overall meaning that matters to me. It might escape some people who just want to read a comic, and that's fine. The overall meaning is what matters.

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.

I seldom deal in symbolisms; if there be hidden meanings in my verse, they are there without my knowledge.

You get a little picture that reflects the whole. You can get readers interested in the life of one guy, and he can reflect the whole life around him. And it's a better picture than the politicians give you.

When I first discovered for myself the Celtic Twilight and read the earlier poems of Yeats and others, all was entirely incomprehensible to me. I groped through a mist of blurred meanings, stumbled through lines in which every accent seemed to be in the wrong place.

I wanted to write a novel where the meaning is in the story and characters and the subliminal, in the shades and nuances. It's exciting to develop that as a writer.

Poems are not read: they are reread. Reread the poem, then read between the lines, then look at it, then watch it, then peek at it: handle it like an object. Contemplate its shadows, angles and dimensions.

I have a boundless passion for Flaubert. It's unthinkable to me that someone might not have read 'Madame Bovary.' He writes with a scalpel. Everything has meaning. My students were not allowed not to like him!

I have one rule when adapting any text: nothing gets added; all the words are the original author's own. But in the ordering and recreation of the story, I can do as I please, and to me, the heart and the point of 'Dracula' is appetite.

You can't tell any kind of a story without having some kind of a theme, something to say between the lines.

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.