Guillermo del Toro Quotes

I'm of the Samuel Goldwyn school of writing: If you need to send a message, call Western Union. Any messages people take away from my books are the ones they see in them.

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

If you have distance from the events, then your story can work as an analogy or parable rather than its literal narrative.

Fiction is a house with many stately mansions, but also one in which it is wise, at least sometimes, to swing from the chandeliers.

Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies.

I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.

Even tiny children looking at a picture book are using their imaginations, gleaning clues from the images to understand what is happening, and perhaps using the throwaway details which the illustrator includes to add their own elements to the story.

Literature is the question minus the answer.

A story is a kind of biopsy of human life. A story is both local, specific, small, and deep, in a kind of penetrating, layered, and revealing way.

All we need to do, reader or writer, from first line to final page, is be as open as a book, and be alive to the life in language - on all its levels.

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

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.

I dislike Allegory - the conscious and intentional allegory - yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language.

Fiction is an elemental force, which has the power to shape reality in its own image - or images, I should say - because reality, like light, exists not only as a single point or particle, but also as an array of possibilities.

I am obsessed with story. I had a late awakening in life. In college was the first time that I understood what you could do with a story and what a good novel is - literary value and subtext and irony and everything.

A tale is born from an image, and the image extends and creates a network of meanings that are always equivocal.

Doesn't all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material?

Touching on universality is an important part of effective storytelling, but the problem with cliches is that they are tired and dull. And that's where writers must try to be artful.

My mind has become somewhat like a book. What I mean by that is that when I look at the world, I see it as a story.

I never was the story. The story was the story. Period.

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.

I want to believe in ghosts. I love ghost stories.

The way that I process and make writing work is I'm really telling true stories; I'm just putting them in a cape and putting an 'S' on its chest.

I'm always curious what the world is trying to tell story wise.