Quotes About Stories

I was interested in dark subject matter for sure, including folklore, fairy tales, mythology, archetypal stories of people going into the bowels of the forest.

Folk tales are the most authentic way of understanding a region, its legend and people.

The brothers Grimm were indeed once read by millions of people - quite often the first reading materials given to people in the 1950s were their tales.

Fairy tales and folk tales are part of the DNA of all stories and great fun to write.

My father was full of tales. He said his family were ministers in the Church of Scotland, or they were lawyers.

From as far back as I can remember, I always loved the King Arthur stories, fairy tales, mythology - things like that. So it was very natural for me when I came to write the 'Prydain' books to sort of follow that direction.

If you are watching a fairy tale, that's why you go to fairy tales: you want these uncomplicated stories and uncomplicated characters. But if it's meant to be real life, you want there to be some reflection of your experience and have something you can hook into.

If you find yourself caring about old stories and regret the ways in which they slip out of reach of young audiences, you may well conjure up the means to put these tales into young peoples imaginations.

I knew that my interest lied in international stories. I was interested in how women were living under the Taliban, for example.

If you're not out living, then you've got nothing to talk about.

I am not an actor. Yes, every so often I appear on talk shows to promote something I've written, and I enjoy doing so because I have a lot of stories to tell, and I like making audiences laugh. But that's not acting. That's just me being me.

I'd always heard stories about how Harpo Marx was the most talkative of the Marx brothers. I found it interesting that someone you never got to hear speak in films would never not speak in real life.

I regret the stories we didn't do - the stories that we knew about and talked about but didn't have all of, so didn't publish. The whole idea of Gawker was to remove the barrier between the thought and the talk - and the page.

I like to hear about what people do. That's more interesting than talking about what the hell I do.

I'm at my best when I'm talking about relationships, talking about women, talking about situations and stories.

I love talking to people, hearing people's stories; I love honest things.

Talking to hosts and asking them, 'What does Airbnb mean to you?'... I get amazingly heartfelt stories about the people that they met, about the money that they earned, about the mindset of empowerment they got through this and how they then applied that to their own business.

Bollywod films run on the shoulders of its lead actors. The audience goes to watch the actors and talks about the story later. On the contrary, Punjabi films are now running on the shoulders of their stories and content, which is an achievement.

Harlem is not a playground for rich bankers and consultants. It's got students of all colors. It's got old people who keep history and tell tall tales.

I've tried to show in my most recent book, the 'Irresistible Fairytale', that in order to talk about any genre, particularly what we call simple genre - a myth, a legend, an anecdote, a tall tale, and so on - we really have to understand something about the origin of stories all together.

I'm drawn to stories about ordinary people who get tangled up in an extraordinary event or idea or emotion. I'm not saying I don't love films about super-people or super-doctors, but my preference is for stories about how we get through this life, what it is to be human, because I'm always struggling with it myself.

So many stories, and to choose which ones to tell and how to tell them. The words, they will tap me on the shoulder and they will speak to me: 'Tell me! Tell me!' The stories choose me.

People with depression, however, share a whole set of stories about the world that are highly distorted, and because their stories are self-fulfilling prophecies, they maintain and reinforce the depression.

There are far too many people for us to think about each of them during our short stay on earth—like the thousands of books in a library we haven't time to read in an afternoon. But this is no excuse to cease browsing. For every now and then, we find that one book that reaches us deep inside and introduces us to ourselves. And, in someone else's story, we come to understand our own.