Symbolism perhaps is a bit in your face, and I've tried my best to control that as best I can as I've grown older and thought that one could approach something with a little more subtlety.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
When you have spent an important part of your life playing Let's Pretend, it's often easy to see symbolism where none exists.
Being a literature major, you know, I'm very familiar with the ways symbolism is used in our sort of mythic tales of society, so anyone who is consciously trying to pull that off I think is really interesting and clearly very smart.
Symbolism is alright in 'fiction,' but I tell true life stories simply about what happened to people I knew.
Whenever I write, I write what I find to be the way people are. I never use any symbolism at all, but if you write as true to life as you possibly can, people will see symbolism. They'll all see different symbolism, but they're apt to because you can see it in life.
Playing with different genres and perspectives and ways of telling stories is one of the perks of being a novelist, but at the same time, I want precision. And in order to be precise about stuff, you have to get personal. Symbolism is very boring.
It's rather amusing at my advanced age to become a sex symbol.
There's no way I set out to be a certain kind of symbol - the way I dress is the way I am, the way I live my life.
In poetic language, in which the sign as such takes on an autonomous value, this sound symbolism becomes an actual factor and creates a sort of accompaniment to the signified.
Symbols are the imaginative signposts of life.
I seldom deal in symbolisms; if there be hidden meanings in my verse, they are there without my knowledge.