Steven Berkoff Quotes

You may name a bronze statue 'Liberty,' or a painted figure in a city hall 'Commerce,' or a marble form in a temple 'Athene' or 'Venus;' but what is really there is only a representation of a single woman.

There's a lot of places where the image of a cube as a thing of power is pertinent. I don't know why that is. I don't have any mythic explanation for it, but it seems to work for people.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.

Statues and pictures and verse may be grand, But they are not the Life for which they stand.

We are a people captivated by the power and romance of metaphor, forever seeking the invisible through the image of the visible.

When does an object become a symbol? All I know is you cannot force it.

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.

I lost many literary battles the day I read 'Their Eyes Were Watching God.' I had to concede that occasionally aphorisms have their power. I had to give up the idea that Keats had a monopoly on the lyrical.

I don't like allegory.

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.

Symbols are important. It depends on how they're used.

The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.

Everything in life is a metaphor.

I don't know a whole lot about symbolism. There seems to me to be a potential danger in symbolism. I feel more comfortable with metaphors and similes.

Metaphorical tone deafness is when people are unable to discern what is of value in something. I think I'm tone deaf to poetry, for instance. Despite having studied it into a second year of university, most of it just leaves me cold.

Of course I didn't pioneer the use of food in fiction: it has been a standard literary device since Chaucer and Rabelais, who used food wonderfully as a metaphor for sensuality.

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

Being a literature major, you know, I'm very familiar with the ways symbolism is used in our sort of mythic tales of society, so anyone who is consciously trying to pull that off I think is really interesting and clearly very smart.

What you look for in a picture is a metaphor, something that means something more, that makes you think about things you've seen or thought about.

A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.

Poetry operates by hints and dark suggestions. It is full of secrets and hidden formulae, like a witch's brew.

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