Whether in cave paintings or the latest uses of the Internet, human beings have always told their histories and truths through parable and fable. We are inveterate storytellers.
The moral of a fable is eternal. The moral of a story is temporary to a story.
What is history but a fable agreed upon?
Despite the strength of the feminist movement in the 1970s and beyond, a fable has persisted that educated women are rejected as marriage partners.
Suspense films are often based on communication problems, and that affects all of the plot points. It almost gives it kind of a fable feeling.
For me, art is make-believe. It's enchantment. It's a fable. I'm enjoying that and playing with it. Of course it's serious, and art is serious, but I'm not going to rarefy it.
Writers are notoriously unable to know about themselves. Faulkner thought 'The Fable' was his best novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald liked 'Tender Is the Night,' an experimental novel.
There are men here and there to whom the whole of life is like an after-dinner hour with a cigar; easy, pleasant, empty, perhaps enlivened by some fable of strife to be forgotten - before the end is told - even if there happens to be any end to it.
The minute that you bring a unicorn into a story, you know that it's a fairy tale or a fable, because unicorns don't exist as animals. They exist as fantasy creatures.
Whosoever counts these Lays as fable, may be assured that I am not of his mind.