George Edward Woodberry Quotes

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

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

Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.

I'm not a religious person. The language of photography is symbolic.

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.

Once an object has been incorporated in a picture it accepts a new destiny.

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.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

How do you show what's not there? How do you show energy?

Images are not quite ideas, they are stiller than that, with less implication outside themselves. And they are not myth, they do not have the explanatory power; they are nearer to pure story. Nor are they always metaphors; they do not say this is that, they say this is.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

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

Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary 'real' world.

Metaphor is embodied in language.

Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies.

In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.

In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view and to be conceptual with a picture. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.

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

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.

Even in a less exaggerated description, any verbal account of a person is bound to find itself employing an assortment of waterfalls, lightning rods, landscapes, birds, etc.

Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.

I'm a very conceptual writer.

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 like to play with tropes.