What draws me in is that a trip is a leap in the dark. It’s like a metaphor for life. You set off from home, and in the classic travel book, you go to an unknown place. You discover a different world, and you discover yourself.
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.
For many years, when people described how the Internet worked – whether they were talking about shopping, communicating, or starting a business there – they inevitably invoked a single metaphor. The Internet, said just about everybody, was a contemporary incarnation of the wild, wild West.
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.
Hiroshima has become a metaphor not just for nuclear war but for war and destruction and violence toward civilians. It’s not just the idea we should not use nuclear arms. We should not start another war because it’s madness.
For the Anglo-Saxons, meat was the main meal of the day, which revolved around ‘before-meat’ and ‘after-meat.’ But it has ended up as the metaphor for the most basic: ‘meat and potatoes’ is as far from sassy – from ‘sauce’ – as you can get.
Peter Pan is kind of this metaphor for someone or something that makes you feel at home, that brings you out of loneliness, that makes you free. And that’s exactly what music does for me.
I went out on a date with Simile. I don’t know what I metaphor.
Pointing is a metaphor we all know. We’ve done a lot of studies and tests on that, and it’s much faster to do all kinds of functions, such as cutting and pasting, with a mouse, so it’s not only easier to use but more efficient.
I’ve simplified much more in my writing. I say what I’ve got to say, not in metaphor.
Some people may say my curved panels look like sails. Well, I am a sailor, so I guess I probably do use that metaphor in my work – though not consciously.
People have been told so often that resurrection is just a metaphor, and means Jesus died and was glorified – in other words, he went to Heaven, whatever that means. And they’ve never realized that the word ‘resurrection’ simply didn’t mean that.
I think ‘Lost Boy’ is more of a metaphor for oneself. When I listen to that song, I don’t picture someone else. I kind of wrote it from a very honest place.
To me, onions are the metaphor for kitchen drudgery. Cutting them is hard to do well, and they fight you the whole way.
I feel like ‘Birds in the Trap’ seem united; it’s just metaphor for ones in their box that are stuck and can’t get their creative idea out.
I would suggest, merely as a metaphor here, but also as the basis for a scientific program to investigate the computational capacity of the universe, that this is also a reasonable explanation for why the universe is complex.
Deep learning is a really powerful metaphor for learning about the world.
I had then and still retain an interest in science for its own sake and as a metaphor for our current lives.
‘Matterhorn’ is my metaphor of the Vietnam War – we built it, we abandoned it, we assaulted it, we lost, and then we abandoned it again.
For me, ‘Angels in America’ is not really about AIDS. For me, it’s a metaphor for anybody who is struggling with serious illness or having to face their own demise. All of the characters face some form of destruction in themselves.
In theory, at least, all presidents are servants of the people who elected them. In the case of Barack Obama, it has seemed from the start that the idea as applied to him was more than mere metaphor. He is the first president in my lifetime whom the country felt obligated to remind that he know his place.
I like ice hockey. No one is ever going to ask me to write about that as a metaphor for life.
For me, I can’t play a metaphor or a symbol.
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.
Fishing is quite a good metaphor for life. You do your prep, you do your thinking, you put your bait out, and you wait, confident that you’ve done your groundwork. But a lot of life is luck.
If you look back at a film like ‘Dawn of the Dead’ – You can either watch it as a straight-up genre film and have fun with zombies being shot, or you can look at it as a metaphor for consumerism. Or a metaphor for the Vietnam war.
Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and – since there is no other metaphor – also the soul.
We’re still living with the old paradigm of age as an arch. That’s the old metaphor: You’re born, you peak at midlife and decline into decrepitude.
I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.
The Dome is a metaphor that could mean anything – it could be nuclear fallout, terrorists – I’ve always been fascinated with stories where people’s roles are flipped on their heads, be it the Wall Street guy, the techno guy, etc. All of those things are only successful when there are people and money around.
The metaphor of Exodus is one that has dogged the Jews from the outset. Their very success attracts resentment.
The Bay of Pigs became a metaphor for feckless folly and failure.
I do genuinely believe that young people who play sport at a competitive level, sensibly controlled, sensibly organised, that has to be a good thing. It will teach them to win, it will teach them to lose with dignity and magnanimity – all the things you want. It’s a pretty good metaphor for life.
Metaphor matters because it creates expectations.
I’ve spoken often of how the fantasy genre is able to, with the greatest freedom among all the genres, take a metaphor and make it real. But of course that’s only the starting point.
There’s something about the superheroes and the idea behind their relationship with humans, whether it’s a metaphor for the better part of ourselves, or the more flawed part of ourselves. So it seems to really be our own pop-culture version of Greek mythology.
Science is all metaphor.
I don’t like seeing myself on television and I don’t enjoy filming. What I actually enjoy is thinking about how I am going to express something or how we are going to make the visual metaphor.
Running is a great metaphor for life. You set a goal, and then you get to work. How well you do is a direct reflection of how hard you work. It’s a mental game, too. There are setbacks along the way, but the true test of a runner is how you overcome and push past them.
What’s a good metaphor for a Harvard student? A talking, gold-plated pile of manure, wearing a fleece.
I do believe that our ability to jam the Trump brand is somewhat limited. I think we can chip away at it, but ultimately, the way to undermine the Trump brand is a better product in the political marketplace, if you’ll forgive the capitalist metaphor.
Metaphor creates a kind of conceptual synesthesia, in which we understand one concept in the context of another.
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?
If there’s a silver bullet in the battle to recapture Albany, it is the re-engagement of our citizens. This capital has become a physical metaphor for the isolation and alienation of our people.
Whether it’s New York or somewhere else, the metaphor of ‘Avenue Q,’ which is the place you live when you can’t afford to live anywhere else – and we’ve all been through that in our journey. As I always say, at any moment I could be back on Avenue Q if I pick the wrong show.
In ‘Age of Innocence,’ the opening flowers, that’s a metaphor for the film, the Victorian veneer with the malevolence beneath it. We attempted to show that with flowers that start as sweet and then slowly become malevolent.
Gene Roddenberry continually reminded us that the Star Trek Enterprise was a metaphor for starship Earth. And the strength in this starship came from its diversity, coming together and working in concert as a team. That is the strength of our countries, Canada and the United States. We are nations of diversity.
The strangest thing that human speech and human writing can do is create a metaphor. That is an amazing leap, is it not?
When you start a novel, it is always like pushing a boulder uphill. Then, after a while, to mangle the metaphor, the boulder fills with helium and becomes a balloon that carries you the rest of the way to the top. You just have to hold your nerve and trust to narrative.
I wanted to define the vocabulary of a wedding both visually and intellectually. The book is about more than weddings or wedding dresses. It’s a metaphor for women’s lives, their creativity.
New poems no longer come to me with their prodigies of metaphor and assonance. Prose endures. I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is, on the whole, preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two.
