Metaphorical Interpretation Quotes

Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.

Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.

Fantasy and science fiction can be literal as well as allegorical and there’s nothing wrong with enjoying a monster like a giant squid for what it is, as well as searching for metaphor.

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

Maybe we need more dialogue in terms of our faith, in terms of those who are believers, or even nonbelievers, about that aspect, and what that might mean if you were interpreting. You don't have to believe it; maybe you could draw a metaphor from it.

I think that life is a paradox and you have to embrace that in your work and your belief systems... You can't be a literalist, and that's the trouble that people always find themselves in. That's why people always hit a wall with any of my stuff, because you can't take it literally.

I take the assumption that every religion has been rooted in some mystical or transcendent experience. From that assumption, I just look at all the different systems as metaphors or doorways to God.

The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.

There's a literal track: who says what to whom, what are people wearing, etcetera. And there's the abstract track: what ideas are suggested by the literal. And the real movie takes place in the relationship between the literal and the abstract.

History is an omlette. THe eggs are already broken.

All religions are true but none are literal.

I am not an intellectual. An intellectual is someone who looks at a sausage and thinks of Picasso, whereas I just say 'pass the mustard'.

What is our life? A play of passion. Our mirth the music of division. Our mother's wombs the tyring houses be, Where we are drest for this short Comedy.

Fiction to me is a kind of parable. You have got to make up your mind it's not true. Some kind of truth emerges from it, but it's not fact.

If Shakespeare can compare all of life to a stage, maybe it's not odd to believe that part of the play can take place on a basketball court.

There is a very good saying that if triangles invented a god, they would make him three-sided.

Sort of like, I have to make the Japanese lyrics really deep.

I'm not a dogmatic Christian and I don't believe in the Bible literally, but I realized that Jesus is basically a very Zen dude.

Life, carefully examined, is actually a form of allegorical literature with a very tight constructural grid laid over it.

A fierce brief fusion which dreamers call real, and realists, an illusion; an insight like the flight of birds.

I never saw fairy tales as an escape or a cop-out... On the contrary, speaking for myself, it is the way to understand reality.

It'is like a book, I think, this bloomin' world.

Life is a dream in the night, a fear among fears, A naked runner lost in a storm of spears.

The funny thing is musicians often love to go to see visual art because you've got all these pictures to turn into metaphors.

I dreamt -- marvellous error! -- that I had a beehive here inside my heart. And the golden bees were making white combs and sweet honey from my old failures.