Northrop Frye Quotes

What I love about writing is the contradictions we all embody as human beings.

And then, 'Why is a raven like a writing desk?' Those things just became so important to the character. You realize that the more you read it, if I read the book again today, I'd find 100 other things that I missed last time. It's a constantly changing book.

God made life simple. It is man who complicates it.

Allegories drawn to great length will always break.

You learn eventually that, while there are no villains, there are no heroes either. And until you make the final discovery that there are only human beings, who are therefore all the more fascinating, you are liable to miss something.

The saving grace of the cinema is that with patience, and a little love, we may arrive at that wonderfully complex creature which is called man.

One day while studying a Yeats poem I decided to write poetry the rest of my life. I recognized that a single short poem has room for history, music, psychology, religious thought, mood, occult speculation, character, and events of one's own life. I still feel surprised that such various substances can find shelter and nourishment in a poem. A poem in fact may be a sort of nourishing liquid, such as one uses to keep an amoeba alive. If prepared right, a poem can keep an image or a thought or insights on history or the psyche alive for years, as well as our desires and airy impulses.

Words mean more than we mean to express when we use them: so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer meant.

Fiction is the microscope of truth.

The first thing you should know about people is that you don’t know the first thing about them.

Power, for the writer....lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.

Numberless are the world's wonders, but none More wonderful than man.

We will have more crises and none of them will look like this because no two crises have anything in common except human nature.

One realizes after a long time that, actually, we are contradictory, all of us.

I think that as a writer your responsibility is to search for and stir up the things that are in this world. There is violence in all of us, and beauty, and strength, and weakness. What's my job? To only write about the good and the beauty, or is it to write about all of it? That's my greater responsibility, to write about them as I see them and as they are.

People are more than you think they are. And they're less, as well. The trick lies in negotiating your way between the two.

Human nature seems to me like the Alps. The depths are profound, black as night, and terrifying, but the heights are equally real, uplifted in the sunshine.

Writers think in metaphors. Editors work in metaphors. A great reader reads in metaphors.

Literature is the human activity that make the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.

Grown ups are complicated creatures, full of quirks and secrets.

The novel remains for me one of the few forms where we can record man's complexity and the strength and decency of his longings.

Look at the world and see what's there. It's very beautiful. It's a very exciting but in some ways treacherous world, and all this goes into the writing.

I hated labels anyway. People didn't fit in slots--prostitute, housewife, saint--like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.

It is not usually possible in a poem or a story to make the relationship between particular and universal fully explicit. Those who try to do so end up writing parables.

Do not underestimate the human being, who sometimes appears so simple. Even with sight as sharp as an eagle, a mind as sharp as a razor, senses more powerful than gods, hearing that can catch the music and the lamentations of life, your knowledge of humanity will never be total.