Metaphor Usage Quotes

I have given a name to my pain, and call it "dog".

Certainly, writing a book was challenging. It took me a long time to learn how to do it. It took me seven years to get a sense of how to wean myself off the process and trickery of songwriting. You realize that giant metaphors work in songs because you have so few words. Standing alone on a page, they threaten to be overblown in a hurry.

I think I'm good at metaphors and descriptions. Plot doesn't come naturally to me, so I work really hard at it.

If you want to relate me to the newer cats, let's go. Let's go line for line and bar for bar. If it's all about spitting and metaphors and MCing and lyrics and entendres, I will eat 99 percent of you dudes up.

Poets use metaphors and symbolism to construct images. I construct my images in the same way, except that I am using a different form.

I discovered the fun of genre is... you get to explore your fears, and you get to use the metaphor of the genre - whether it's a giant monster or a... 12-year-old vampire. Whatever it is, you can sink something underneath the surface and make a personal film under the guise of great fun romp.

The 1947 Court (Everson v. Board of Education) for the first time had used only Jefferson's metaphor - completely divorced from its context and intent.

The songs that work best are broad lyrically and have one strong concept in the metaphor.

The things that are said in literature are always the same. What is important is the way they are said. Looking for metaphors, for example: When I was a young man I was always hunting for new metaphors. Then I found out that really good metaphors are always the same.

In my mind, there's usually a fairly definitive kind of narrative when I write. But I don't want to enforce that on other people. I think that's why I like using metaphor so much.

An enormous amount of scientific language is metaphorical. We talk about a genetic code, where code originally meant a cipher; we talk about the solar system model of the atom as though the atom were like a sun and moon and planets.

Of metaphors, those generally conduce most to energy or vivacity of style which illustrate an intellectual by a sensible object.

For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together.

I've tried every which way for writing lyrics - everything from using really bizarre imagery and metaphors, sort of obscuring the facts of what I'm singing about, all the way over to a song like 'Losing My Mind,' where you're just reading my thoughts as they're occurring.

I did write more mainstream stuff with DK. But you could always tell the records that I wrote in contrast with everybody else's because the format was a bit different. The harmonies were used in a different type of way. Way more metaphors in the mix.

I guess I have a weird habit of writing body part metaphors.

It was easier than explaining DiMaggio's use as a metaphor.

I ought to be more hardboiled; I'd like to be. I don't think I have it in me. To write in clipped sentences. To employ gritty metaphor in the introduction of sultry blondes... I can't do it, so why bother trying?

Instinct is still important, but now I can easily identify problems like cliches and mixed metaphors, and I have a broader palette to work off of.

When I can't talk sense, I talk metaphor.

Don't use metaphors in fantasy; your readers will take them literally. Or they may take them figuratively - but if so, they'll also take your magics and transformations figuratively. Either way, you're in trouble.

I'm surely not the only one to notice we employ metaphors to make sense of the news. I always like to take note of who hides their origins and who shows them off.

I remember when I started writing lyrics, I was very grand. I tried to use a lot of symbols, because I thought that's how songwriting should be - with imagery and metaphor. I figured, after a while, maybe I should just write it as I would say in real life.

For 16 years I spoke in trial metaphors, and perhaps I need to get out of that habit.

I'm not building each one character around one metaphor, so much as trying to build a heroic archetype that can be used to express the kind of metaphors that I find in each story.