The strangest thing that human speech and human writing can do is create a metaphor. That is an amazing leap, is it not?

Television's Mr. Filth: that's me.

Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty.

I believe everybody is responsible for what they do themselves.

God, I'm such a lazy writer - I can't even think up new names.

Just letting it out is one of the definitions of bad art.

I did not fully understand the dread term 'terminal illness' until I saw Heathrow for myself.

The strangest thing that human speech and human writing can do is create a metaphor. That is an amazing leap, is it not?

Everything we do has consequences.

Ideals jump across the hierarchies of the printed word.

That vision of a common culture is now simply a remote wistfulness.

I was given talent, and if you are given it, it is your obligation to use it.

It is a dangerous thing to have instant access to your emotions.

The more my work improves or broadens or widens, the more surely I tame myself.

The knowledge that we have about what it is to be human that we have as a child is something we necessarily must lose.

The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they have been in.

I have been aware, from the age of 6, that I had talent.

Religion, you can't a handle on it, you just have to know or not know-people either believe or they don't believe.

The thing about imagination is that by the very act of putting it down, there must be some truth in one's own imagination.

Children are very cruel, yes. Of course. Children are extraordinarily cruel little creatures.

There's no end to the inventiveness of critics, I tell you. Because they can't write fiction, they put their impulse into their analysis of work.

As adults, we do know more, but we don't know enough. People can be very unthinkingly callous.

Metaphor is embodied in language.

I think childhood is to everyone a lost land.

Therapy, as opposed to analysis, is a whole construct of myth, beautiful and creative.

As a piece of literacy criticism, Freud's best writing is about Dostoyevsky. It's a kind of displaced literacy criticism.

A bad act done will fester and create in its own way. It's not only goodness that creates. Bad things create. They have their own yeast.

The loss of Eden is personally experienced by every one of us as we leave the wonder and magic and also the pains and terrors of childhood.

You have to assert something about yourself in order to be yourself.

People endure what they endure and they deal with it. It may corrupt them. It may lead them into all sorts of compensatory excesses.

To love it too much is to obscure and not see what is there.

Some of the words and symbols and images from childhood will continually be part and parcel of my personality.

Unlike metaphor, metonymy does not try to fuse images together.

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.

The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.

We often attribute 'understanding' and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions.

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.

But in fact if you look at film as a metaphor, only through the negative can you have the positive print. What I'm trying to get to is the positive value of negation.

Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.

In this metaphor we actually have a picture of the computational universe, a metaphor which I hope to make scientifically precise as part of a research program.

Sports is a metaphor for overcoming obstacles and achieving against great odds. Athletes, in times of difficulty, can be important role models.

The strangest thing that human speech and human writing can do is create a metaphor. That is an amazing leap, is it not?

The metaphor of the king as the shepherd of his people goes back to ancient Egypt. Perhaps the use of this particular convention is due to the fact that, being stupid, affectionate, gregarious, and easily stampeded, the societies formed by sheep are most like human ones.

We all perform our lives in a way. And the actor is a perfect metaphor to get at that theme of 'how do we find our authentic selves?' And that we all - whether we're actors or not - perform ourselves. As a way of searching. As a way of fumbling around and trying to say, is this my voice? Is this who I am?

Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.

The Olympics are a wonderful metaphor for world cooperation, the kind of international competition that's wholesome and healthy, an interplay between countries that represents the best in all of us.

The Holocaust is a central event in many people's lives, but it also has become a metaphor for our century. There cannot be an end to speaking and writing about it. Besides, in Israel, everyone carries a biography deep inside him.

I heard my name associated with the Peter Pan syndrome more than once. But really, what's so wrong with Peter Pan? Peter Pan flies. He is a metaphor for dreams and faith.

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