Irwin Edman Quotes

I have to have an emotional connection to what I am ultimately selling because it is emotion, whether you are selling religion, politics, even a breath mint.

For thousands of years, humans have used the art of storytelling to motivate and persuade.

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

Personally I always feel like I could use a little more of poetry apothegmatic power in my own work but we're always lacking something.

It is acceptable to bring someone to tears if it explains to them in an emotional way why a product, a service, or a candidate is the right person, is the right thing to do.

Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies.

To hell with facts! We need stories!

I must say, when I reread myself, it's the poetry I tend to look at. It's the most exciting to write, and it's over the quickest.

Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

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.

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

The long poem cannot be a digressive, expansive, boring exposition. It is really made of very sharp, Imagistic, quintessential poetic elements.

I think writing a poem is like being a greyhound. Writing a novel is like being a mule. You go up one long row, then down another, and try not to look up too often to see how far you still have to go.

A myth is far truer than a history, for a history only gives a story of the shadows, whereas a myth gives a story of the substances that cast the shadows.

I don't like allegory.

Some stories are true that never happened.

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.

When you describe a character's dream, it has to be sharper than reality in some way and more meaningful. It has to somehow speak to plot, character, and all the rest.

We often find far more power in a symbol than in something that is an an actuality.

Songwriting is just like any other kind of writing - it's either fiction or nonfiction. You can even get into philosophy and politics, which I've done on occasion.

The movies I make, I never see them as accurately portraying a life, but more like fables.

When I discovered metaphor and what it meant, I got really excited. That was what really pushed me through into music.

Passion impels our deeds; ideology supplies the explanations.

Fiction to me is a kind of parable. You have got to make up your mind it's not true. Some kind of truth emerges from it, but it's not fact.