“Sylvester: What about figuration in a more literal sense?”

“Remember this… develop a sense of nostalgia for something, or you'll never figure out what's important.”

“I will argue that in the literal sense the programmed computer understands what the car and the adding machine understand, namely, exactly nothing.”

“There's a deep thirst and hunger to know more about space, literally because of the Star Trek phenomenon.”

“The teachings of the Bible are so interwoven and entwined with our whole civic and social life that it would be literally impossible for us to figure to ourselves what that life would be if these teaching were removed.”

“I've never had any intentions about anything. That's why I am where I am today, which is neither here nor there, in a literal sense.”

“Do as the beautiful woman: see to your figure and your petticoats. Though, of course, I am not speaking literally.”

“[Institutional entrepreneurs must] size up the condition of the organizational field and figure out what kinds of action make sense.”

“The single greatest influence on my work as a filmmaker has been the celebrated Interviews with Francis Bacon (1980) by David Sylvester. Sylvester is a master of the art of complicity: he knows how to manipulate and exploit it. Complicity requires being cautiously intellectual yet profoundly human in the sense that the interviewer must act as the concerned midwife, allowing the interviewee to express himself while at the same time guiding his thoughts to a satisfactory conclusion through sensitive provocation.”

“Metaphor is one of a group of problem-solving medicines known as figures of speech which are normally used to treat literal thinking and other diseases.”