“Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don’t you say what you mean?"”

“All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.”

“[M]aybe the strings break, or maybe our ships sink, or maybe we're grass—our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is still alive. We don't suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters. If you choose the strings, then you're imagining a world in which you can become irreparably broken. If you choose the grass, you're saying that we are all infinitely interconnected, that we can use these root systems not only to understand one another but to become one another. The metaphors have implications.”

“Dialectic functions by converting everything it touches into figure but metaphor is a means of perceiving one thing in terms of another.”

“The symbol and the metaphor are as necessary to science as to poetry.”

“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.”

“Writers who have nothing to say always strain for metaphors to say it in.”

“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.”

“It's a brilliant metaphor. What I meant to say was, when you see a monkey masturbating at the zoo…”

“When we link things metaphorically we recognise similarity in difference, we think one thing in terms of attributes of another.”