You should treat a muse like a fairy.
You see the fairy tale – four minutes of glory at the Olympics. I thought my life would be cake after that.
I was a Nancy Drew girl. Also Grimms’ fairy tales.
I’m not sure if it’s fair to call it a ‘fairy tale,’ but I really loved ‘Mulan,’ the Disney film. It was my favorite. I guess it’s not really a fairy tale, but you do get Eddie Murphy as a dragon.
As a little girl living in the English countryside, I used to go running around in the forests, creating my own fairy tale.
‘Star Wars’ is more fairy tale than true science fiction.
Living in a zoo means it wasn’t always sparkly dresses, but I would still dress up. I had this pink sparkly dress and fairy wings, and I’d put those on and then go and dance in the zoo.
At no point do I ever remember taking religion very seriously or even feeling that the biblical stories were any different from fairy stories. Certainly, none of it made any sense. By comparison, the world in which I lived, though I might not always understand it in all aspects, always made a lot of sense.
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 absolutely believed when I was young because the Tooth Fairy was always good to me. The Tooth Fairy generally left me a dollar or two dollars and, as a kid, that was a lot of money.
When ‘Johnny Bravo’ was going to end, I thought, ‘I really need to sell something. I need a job.’ So, I sat down and just sketched this little boy with a fairy godmother. I was going to do a boy version of ‘Cinderella.’
I like being scared, so I’ve always liked fairy tales because they’re kind of creepy.
Soils and national characters differ, but fairy tales are the same in plot and incidents, if not in treatment.
Each time I’m starting to work on a film, even if I love to settle the plot in the real world, I start to think about the plot as a fairy tale, or a dream, or a nightmare… As if it was the best way to tell the truth about characters or narration, instead of realism.
The forest has always been a place, in fairy tales and in Shakespeare, where you go and discover who you are. You get stripped of everything you thought you were, some type of ordeal takes place, and you come out stronger.
I grew up with a lot of fairy tales. And they had an essence of darkness to them.
You know when you have a party as a kid, and your mom hires a fairy, princess, or superhero to come host the party? I was Fairy Lavender. I loved it. It was good training for theater.
I wrote a lot of scripts that were dark and fairy tale-like, but too strange.
Conservatives used to believe in confronting hard truths, not succumbing to comforting fairy tales. Some still do.
The good historian is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies.
For me, any fiction of nobles and swords necessarily has to be a story of corruption, injustice and savagely violent conflict – because any other treatment is going to have all the heft and realistic honesty of a bedtime fairy tale for five year olds.
Fairy tales, which teach a moral lesson, are about ourselves. Myth deals with forces greater than ourselves.
I think ‘Wreck-It Ralph’ can stand proudly in the pantheon of the great Disney animated films. It’s a fairy tale disguised as something more contemporary. With its balance of heart and comedy, it is still very much rooted in the Disney legacy.
I don’t think one should incentivise the losing of teeth. I find the idea of a child getting an iPad, or a £20 note, for losing a tooth, utterly abhorrent. Fifty pence, or a pound at most, is what my children can expect from the Tooth Fairy.
Fairy tales are really violent, the original ones.
Miramax seems to be showing the same faith in Roberto Benigni’s ‘Pinocchio’ that the Republican Party showed in Trent Lott; the live-action version of Carlo Collodi’s fairy tale about the wooden puppet whose only ambition was to be a real live boy was sneaked into theaters Christmas Day.
‘Extraordinary’ is an original fairy tale, a contemporary story. But like a traditional fairy tale, it heads quickly into frightening, bloody territory. I am afraid for my book, as it goes out alone into the world, just as I was frightened for Phoebe as I wrote and rewrote her story.
There are benefits to adopting a toddler. They can tell you what’s wrong. And – everything we did with our daughter was a first. Her first tooth fairy. Santa.
My childhood ambition was to become a Tooth Fairy. And I do talk about that in my book ‘Is You Okay.’ My mama always told me to say I wanted to be a corporate lawyer, and today I am much closer to being a Tooth Fairy than I ever was a Corporate Lawyer… so hah hah hah hah.
Fairy tales are stories of triumph and transformation and true love, all things I fervently believe in.
There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
‘Seconds’ is grounded in the reality of this restaurant environment, and I did do plenty of research, so there’s that. It takes place in a town that is like a kinder, gentler fairy tale version of reality. Then it takes off into a story that is very strange, very mental.
I’ve learned that I want what I deny. I want someone who is crazy about me, who treats me like a princess. I want the picture-perfect fairy tale stuff.
Fairy tales, because they have a very clear structure, are easier to interfere with. Also they have this really weird logic: the kind of logic that you only really experience when you’re not feeling very well, or as a child.
One of the first houses we lived in was like out of a fairy story. We had a stream that ran through our garden, and we played with the ducks – we locked them in my mum’s office, and they pooed everywhere. It was crazy, picking blackberries and mushrooms, rabbits running through your legs.
As a shy kid growing up in Sheffield, I fantasized about how it would be great to be famous so I wouldn’t actually have to talk to people and feel awkward. And of course, as we all know from fairy stories, when you achieve that ambition, you find out you don’t want it.
I had a fairy shrine in my room, and I went to fairy LARPing camp, and I played Dungeons and Dragons in the woods.
The universe has a much greater imagination than we do, which is why the real story of the universe is far more interesting than any of the fairy tales we have invented to describe it.
I’m a great believer in fairy tales. I think it is important to have something you can lose yourself in.
The ‘Mahabharata’ is a more complex and longer saga than the ‘Ramayana,’ which is like a fairy tale. It’s much lighter and more fun, and at its heart, there’s a cracking love story.
Fairy tales were great because they provided a no-limits playground for my imagination, and growing up, there’s nothing more exciting.
Once upon a time, I was a little girl sick in the hospital, and my mother gave me a copy of ‘Grimm’s Fairy Tales’ to comfort me.
When I started acting, I didn’t think of it as a career. I always thought Hollywood was this magical world where a fairy came down and said, ‘Come live with the Munchkins; you are now one of us.’ I didn’t understand the concept of it as a career. I thought I would save up enough money to go to college.
We were wild-eyed hippies from the late ’60s. We still had the exuberance of the mind-expanding ’60s – that Tolkienesque, Zeppelin, androgynous, wood nymph, forest fairy kind of innocence. It sounds stupid now, but we felt we were changing the world with music.
Why should a horror film be just a horror film? To me, The Company of Wolves is a fairy tale; it’s got all those elements plus a lot more. And we know that fairy tales aren’t innocent any more.
As a child, I loved fairy tales because the story, the what-comes-next, is paramount. As an adult, I’m fascinated by their logic and illogic.
I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.
A peace agreement isn’t like a fairy story. You don’t live happily ever after.
I have never dreamed of being a princess. I have not longed for Prince Charming. I have and do long for something resembling a happily ever after. I am supposed to be above such flights of fantasy, but I am not. I am enamored of fairy tales.
When I was a kid, Santa, the Tooth Fairy, my stuffed animals – they were real. There is the tremendous suspension of disbelief that you have as a child. It’s harder as an adult.
I taught a class about the Tony Awards at a summer theater camp the year after I graduated from high school. So, the first time I was nominated for ‘Spring Awakening,’ it felt like a surreal dream: it was every childhood dream I had come true. It felt like a fairy tale.
It is my childhood dream to have a Christian-style wedding, just like the fairy tales.
I want to tell women that you need to love yourself and make yourself a priority. It’s only when you are happy yourself, can you make everyone else around you happy. I am still a dreamer and still believe in fairy tales, but there is only that much one should give another person. You need to keep something for yourself.
