The cinema has done more for my spiritual life than the church. My ideas of fame, success and beauty all originate from the big screen. Whereas Christian religion is retreating everywhere and losing more and more influence; film has filled the vacuum and supports us with myths and action-controlling images.
Like every Canadian, I have been taught that one of the most important functions of art is to supply and elaborate the myths and narratives of nationhood.
As a kid, I was obsessed with myths and legends and the haunting beauty of gothic stories.
I’d like to explode a few myths about what we call classical music. It’s not high art for the titillation of a chosen few.
The sea always offers up incredible stories of survivors’ fortitude. Myths of a lot of countries have variations on that.
As we were developing ‘Umbral’, and I was delving into the mythology and legends, I had a sudden realisation. ‘Wasteland’ is about people who fervently believe new myths and legends, but they turn out to be false; whereas ‘Umbral’ is about people who reject ancient myths and legends, but they turn out to be true!
I think that there is incredible prejudice about witches while there is no prejudice about wizards. Words are very important, and I’m really into destroying myths.
‘Sanctus’ deals with creation myths in every culture. It fascinates me that all cultures, evolving independently, have similar models of mankind’s origins, of a Greater Being, of the flood, and so on. It’s amazing how they crop up time and time again.
People create the sort of myths they want to believe about themselves.
The theatre has always been voraciously omnivorous. Dramatists have always raided every medium to find grist to their mill: myths, folk tales, newspapers, novels, films, works of art of all kinds.
The nomads’ egalitarian lifestyle astonished the Greeks, who kept their own women indoors weaving and minding children. The exotic Scythian lifestyle fueled the Greek imagination and led to an outpouring of myths about fierce Amazons, ‘the equals of men.’
Humans live through their myths and only endure their realities.
Magic is at the core of myths.
It’s amazing how much misinformation there is about pregnancy and how many myths are still ingrained into our culture.
I think one of the biggest myths is that education cannot flourish with regulation. Another myth is that wherever the state sponsors education, it doesn’t flourish.
I believe in everything until it’s disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now?
I don’t believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene.
I wish, to be honest, that there were more myths about me. I wish I was more of a mythical person, and that then I’d have myths to dispel.
Well, one of the myths early on that I think is one of the funnier things we’ve done is airline toilet seats. That one was about a large woman that sat down on a seat in an airline and flushed the toilet and got stuck on it.
In a very general way, our society has fallen out of love with the skilled trades. Part of the problem is a myriad of myths and misperceptions that surround the jobs themselves, but the biggest cause is our stubborn belief that a four-year degree is the best path for the most people.
Growing up as a Brit, Arthur and Merlin and Camelot, and just the idea of it, is embedded in the culture and in your soul, growing up. King Arthur is alongside Robin Hood, as those great British folk tales, myths and icons.
The bedroom is an archetype. To me it stands for a lot of the silliness of our modern culture where the kind of things that we worship in our sacred spaces are based on media and movies because we don’t really have much else in the way of myths, if that makes sense.
Distinctly American poetry is usually written in the context of one’s geographic landscape, sometimes out of one’s cultural myths, and often with reference to gender and race or ethnic origins.
Don’t let the myths make you believe that women don’t support other women.
Because I was an only, I had more things, and I remember early on the kick I got from giving stuff away. Despite all the myths about only children not being able to share, actually I’ve never knowingly met a stingy one.
We obsess about celebrities. We create them, build myths around them, and then hunt them and destroy them. I don’t know where it’s taking us or what it means, but I know we do it. I have seen a lot of it myself.
I was always interested in myths growing up. So, first I got into some Roman myths, then I was interested in Norse, then Celtic, then I started spreading to all the other mythologies.
Congress acknowledged that society’s accumulated myths and fears about disability and disease are as handicapping as are the physical limitations that flow from actual impairment.
Because of my Marxism, I was not into myths or miracles, whether it was the virgin birth, the physical resurrection or casting out demons from an epileptic.
Europe is so much the home of Horror, with its myths of vampires, werewolves, witchcraft and the undead, yet it’s like those myths were exported to Hollywood, leaving Europe the room to develop a new tradition as a way of processing its traumas, particularly the two world wars.
The pro-gun propaganda peddled by the National Rifle Association feeds myths about gun ownership, and these myths arguably perpetuate the suffering of thousands of Americans each year.
For many people, Timbuktu has long represented the essence of remoteness: a mythical, faraway place located on the boundaries of our collective consciousness. But like many of the myths associated with colonialism, the reality is very different.
The amount of sleep – the total amount of sleep that you get – starts to decrease the older that we get. I think one of the myths out there is that we simply need less sleep as we age, and that’s not true, in fact.
Myths are part of our DNA. We’re a civilisation with a continuous culture. The effort to modernize it keeps it alive. Readers connect with it.
All myths that are something more than fancies gain rather than lose in value with time, by reason of the accretions of human experience.
On The Practice, I get to do what I love to do, and I am making a contribution that will, in the end, help raise social consciousness, dispel some of the myths about being large, and change the way that people view and interact with large people.
But because we live in an age of science, we have a preoccupation with corroborating our myths.
I don’t really know football from the Seventies and Eighties. It’s all myths and legends to me.
Myths are stories that express meaning, morality or motivation. Whether they are true or not is irrelevant.
With each film, I get more and more involved and it’s more and more time-consuming. Also, I like to break myths and people’s preconceived ideas. My characters have always stood for something, have always had an opinion, although they’ve never really rebelled.
If we began deconstructing the myths at the heart of every religion, we would be citizens of a Marxian Utopia.
Instead of blaming victimization on the victims, the Gospels blame it on the victimizers. What the myths systematically hide, the Bible reveals.
Our connection to the great myths of our natures is murky. A mother might see the Medea in herself without imagining she will ever do away with her children.
A good nationalism has to depend on a principle of the common people, on myths of a struggling commonality.
There are so many myths out there about Marianne Faithfull, I had to, um, detach. But I can turn it on because Marianne Faithfull is really an attitude, you know.
Donald Trump’s whole candidacy from the time he started has been filled with myths by the media that he couldn’t – he was not a serious candidate.
Literature – Eastern and Western – abounds with stories, myths, legends about the search for youth, for eternal life.
‘Star Wars’ or ‘The Lord of the Rings’ deal with great big Joseph Campbell-style myths, good and evil.
There have been many, many paintings of Theseus and the Minotaur, as it is one of the more popular myths, so how could I make mine different and new? I decided it would be best to make the most dynamic painting I could. I wanted to capture the moment right before the Minotaur’s horn was snapped.
There are a lot of myths about my injuries. They say I have broken every bone in my body. Not true. But I have broken 35 bones. I had surgery 14 times to pin and plate. I shattered my pelvis. I forget all of the things that have broke.
We tend to think of divorced or complicated families as a modern invention, and that is not at all true. You only have to read the Greek myths to see broken homes, widows, divorce, stepchildren, children trying to get along with new parents.
How come trying to explode myths about Texas always winds up reinforcing them?
Nothing, not even human life, is more precious to us than our myths about ourselves.
I have had the view that cutting wages is not the path to prosperity, and one of the great myths propagated about my attitude to industrial relations is that I believe in lower wages. I’ve never believed in lower wages. Never. Never believed in lower wages, I’ve never believed in lower wages as an economic instrument.
