Kurt Busiek Quotes

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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 cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations.

Some truths are expressed best in the form of myth.

Stories pass the experienced world back and forth between them as a metaphor, until it is worn out. Only then do we realize that meaning is an act. We must repossess it, instant to instant in our lives.

I think sometimes a narrative can come out of a single word.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

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

I keep trying to define 'poetry,' but it's so difficult.

Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

Words are not pebbles in alien juxtaposition.

So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations.

My secrets must be poetic to be believable.

All poetry is an ordered voice, one which tries to tell you about a vision in the un-visionary language of farm, city, and love.

The purpose of narrative is to present us with complexity and ambiguity.

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.

Metaphor matters because it creates expectations.

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.