The Weeknd Quotes

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.

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

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

When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.

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

I like to play with tropes.

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

I don't like allegory.

Film is not an amazing medium to relay interiority. I think literature is much better for that.

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.

Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.

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

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

My secrets must be poetic to be believable.

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.

I'm a very conceptual writer.

It is the test of a novel writer's art that he conceal his snake-in-the-grass; but the reader may be sure that it is always there.

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

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.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

Ray Bradbury taught me the importance of metaphor and simile and poetic style.

The more songs I've written, the more I've grown interested in telling a story. When I first began, I had this list of opaque phrases where you can make of it what you want.

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.

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