Quotes About Stories

Can you imagine what it would be like if all the Aussie film talent was able to make Australian stories?

There's a lot of young females doing R&B in England who are extremely talented and deserve more light on their stories.

At Marvel, I was lucky enough to work with really talented people, but I always had this nagging thought: 'One day I'll write my own stories.'

Everything starts with fishermen's tales. Everywhere you go the fishermen talk.

I loved fairy tales when I was a kid. Grimm. The grimmer the better. I loved gruesome gothic tales and, in that respect, I liked Bible stories, because to me they were very gothic.

I'm no longer religious, but the Bible fascinates me. Hardly anyone reads it anymore, but it's got everything: it's a book of poetry, it's a book of principle, it's a book of stories, and of myths and of epic tales, a book of histories and a book of fictions, of riddles, fables, parables and allegories.

I'm fascinated with the stories that we tell. Real histories become fantasies and fairy tales, morality tales and fables. There's something interesting and funny and perverse about the way fairytale sometimes passes for history, for truth.

I think people should read fairy tales, because we're hungry for a mythology that will speak to our fears.

I love monsters, I love creatures, I love beings, I love aliens. That's more supernatural and more the stuff of fairy tales. Fairy tales are as ancient as we are. I love those stories. I think they're really interesting because they always have more than simply the fright aspect. There's something deeply psychological.

Neurologists say that our brains are programmed much more for stories than for abstract ideas. Tales with a little drama are remembered far longer than any slide crammed with analytics.

Most songs that aren't jump-rope songs, or lullabies, are cautionary tales or goodbye songs and road songs.

I'm a Hollywood kid, and I know that there are only so many stories. Only so many tales around the campfire that we have to tell. Then we have to regurgitate them. Our grandparents' movies were all remakes of silent films - we forget that, but it's true.

Sometimes you have to censor books. When I read 'Peter Rabbit,' I skip the part about Peter's father ending up in one of Mrs. McGregor's pies. I also hid the book of 'Grimm Fairy Tales.' They're just too grim for my grandkids. Reality will come soon enough.

The spark for 'In Praise of Slowness' came when I began reading to my children. Every parent knows that kids like their bedtime stories read at a gentle, meandering pace. But I used to be too fast to slow down with the Brothers Grimm. I would zoom through the classic fairy tales, skipping lines, paragraphs, whole pages.

They were written on cheap blue notebooks bought by poor women. I'm interested in folk tales in the way that medicine and magic in women's stories are all kind of combined.

I found a lot of fairy tales scary. They really didn't sit well with me.

I'm not certain that I draw from any one culture more than others. Many myths and legends of many different cultures are really the same story when you get to the heart of it. They are often cultural cautionary tales about how we should behave and how we should live.

Cautionary tales were fantastic in the '70s.

Apparently I'm well-known for my stories, my raconteur tales, that sort of thing.

If you look at children's stories in fairy tales, they're pretty brutal.

The Grimm collections were never intended for children. Not because kids were excluded, but because the division we make today of children's literature didn't exist then. The idea of protecting children from tales with violence didn't occur until the earlier part of the 19th century.

I have always been fascinated by the supernatural elements in stories, whether fairy tales, myths, film or literature.

I certainly have been writing stories that are hard science fiction, that are very reminiscent of 'Golden Age tales' from the '40s and '50s. I've also written stories that are very high fantasy that are the direct opposite of that style.

Maybe even at six or seven, I knew that, sweet as they were on the surface, all fairy tales needed a feminist shake up.