Umberto Eco Quotes

The sky was the color of Edgar Allan Poe's pajamas.

Be able to describe anything visual, such as a street scene, in words that convey your meaning.

The mountain trembled like an earthquake. Dust flew into the sky. And the rock turned dark red, like the color of blood'. 'How would you know?' Asks Sindhi cap. 'You only have a black and white television'. 'But it's a very good one. You can almost see colours.

Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

Television broadcasts have, in the main, been more suggestive, less specific, more distant in their images than the print press: often you knew that lump was a dead body only because a chattering reporter told you it was.

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

Take it not amiss, O speech, that I borrow weighty words, and later try hard to make them seem light.

I tend to like the last sentence I just wrote, which is: 'It was late in the fall and the trees lining our driveway had turned red like a row of burning matches.'

Readers want to visualize your story as they read it. The more exact words you give them, the more clearly they see it, smell it, hear it, taste it. Thus, a dog should be an 'Airedale,' not just a 'dog.' A taste should not be merely 'good' but 'creamy and sweet' or 'sharply salty' or 'buttery on the tongue.'

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

If, in the very first pages, I'm forced to read gratuitous phrases or banal metaphors, I won't be able to get inside the story. Only if the sentences 'sparkle' can I get hooked.

I guess I have a weird habit of writing body part metaphors.

There's this poet named Walter Benton, I really like his stuff. He always uses landscapes as a metaphor for the female body.

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.

Irony deals with opposites; it has nothing to do with coincidence.

A great many political speeches are literary parricides; they kill their fathers.

Liquid, flowing words are the choicest and the best, if language is regarded as music. But when it is considered as a picture, then there are rough words which are very telling, they make their mark.

The aphorism: a platitude that swerves, or slides all the way around.

I use a lot of similes and metaphors when I work, simply because it's my best way of describing a building or a scene. I'm terrible at describing landscapes - trees, buildings. The inanimate things don't interest me: I always think, "Oh, no, here comes another building I have to describe." So I usually use a simile or metaphor.

Her lips were like large crimson polyps.

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

Soft is the strain when zephyr gently blows, And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows; But when loud surges lash the sounding shore, The hoarse rough verse should like the torrent roar. When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw, The line too labours, and the words move slow: Not so when swift Camilla scours the plain, Flies o'er th' unbending corn, and skims along the main.

Analogies are figures intended to serve as fatal weapons if they succeed, and as innocent toys if they fail.