It is my childhood dream to have a Christian-style wedding, just like the fairy tales.
Fairy tales, before they were sanitized, were very dark, and kids love that. ‘Coraline’ by Neil Gaiman feels like Beckett for kids. I think there’s plenty of room for that. And I think there’s a danger of being too patronizing to children, having things too sanitized.
I have always been fascinated by the supernatural elements in stories, whether fairy tales, myths, film or literature.
I gravitated to Judy Blume early on. ‘Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing’ was my favorite, with a realistic and relatable protagonist in Peter Hatcher. When I reached the fourth grade, I made the leap to science fiction and never looked back.
But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?
When I was a kid, both my mom and my dad worked night shifts, so we would spend a lot of time at my grandfather’s house. He taught at UCLA and was just really into history. Before bed, when other kids heard fairy tales, he would tell us about the American founding fathers and the beginning of democracy.
I was a Nancy Drew girl. Also Grimms’ fairy tales.
I have come to the conclusion that a goodly number of the fables that pass under the name of the Samian slave, Aesop, were derived from India, probably from the same source whence the same tales were utilised in the Jatakas, or Birth-stories of Buddha.
When you hear the words ‘magic’ and ‘story’, they will probably evoke thoughts of your favourite fairy tales from childhood. Storybook pages abound with all manner of magic: fantastical fairies, wish-granting genies, or even a certain boy wizard.
Fairy tales read before bed tend to make me dream. They’re all quite violent stories, as are my dreams.
On that other novels followed: but I still wrote fairy tales and dreamy poems of another world.
What I like about fairy tales is that they highlight the emotions within a story. The situations aren’t real, with falling stars and pirates. But what you do relate to is the emotions that the characters feel.
A scientist in his laboratory is not a mere technician: he is also a child confronting natural phenomena that impress him as though they were fairy tales.
I don’t know what to think about magic and fairy tales.
If you look at children’s stories in fairy tales, they’re pretty brutal.
To portray an iconic character has been brilliant in itself, and to be able to do that on a show like ‘Once Upon a Time’ enhances that because the show puts a spin on characters and makes them very different and puts core values that are very different that aren’t in the original fairy tales a lot of people relate to.
Dead men tell no tales.
I was weaned not on television or Wild West sagas but on stories of nationalism and patriotism. I would sit at my mother’s feet by the hour and drink in these exciting tales of the freedom fighters in our family.
While every historical era has its unique appeal as a setting for tales of crime and detection, the 19th century is exceptional – it brought about so much change on social, political, geographical, and technological fronts that the mix proves to be an irresistible one to mystery writers.
When I was a kid, there were these great comic books called ‘Tales From The Crypt’ and ‘The Vault of Horror.’ They were gruesome. I discovered them in the barbershop and thought they were fabulous.
I think that true love, fairy tales, the positive messages of positive stories – I don’t think those ever die. Sometimes we like to hide them in sarcasm or irony, but they are still there, and they still move us.
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.
To be honest, Peter Pan was one of those fairy tales that I sort of related to, and I think that’s the case with a lot of kids. The whole idea of escapism really resonates with a lot of kids.
Tales of cheating on school and college tests are rife. There have been instances where teachers have given students test answers in order to make themselves look good on their performance reviews. Mentors who should be teaching the opposite are sending a message that lying and cheating are acceptable.
When I was little, I made up my own fairy tales, and the ghostly echo of ‘Once upon a time’ shapes all the fiction I’ve ever written.
I am completely fascinated by the differences and comparisons between real life and fairy tales because we’re raised as little girls to think that we’re a princess and that Prince Charming is going to sweep us off our feet.
When I was doing ‘Tales from Hollywood’ at the National, I was invited to dinner by the choreographer, Kenneth MacMillan. He told me I had the heart of a dancer and asked me if I’d like to come on at the end of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ as a friar. I said I’d love to, but sadly, MacMillan died shortly after.
The Bible… provides no guide to reading the Bible. In fact, it is full of such inconsistencies, contradictions, lacunae, obscurities, baffling tales, and poetic imagery that to quote it at all is to select from conflicting alternative passages. Every quotation is therefore necessarily an interpretation.
Fantasy encompasses a wide, wide spectrum of writing. We have beast fables, we have gothics, we have tales of vampires and werewolves, and we have sword and sorcery; we have epics from Homer, and there is just so much out there that we put under the umbrella of ‘fantasy.’
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.
Fairy tales and folk tales have always played a role in my writing in one way or another.
In the sixth grade, I auditioned for a play called ‘Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing.’ I got the lead, and I was terrified, but I went and did it.
While Fledging is a different type of book, The Parable series serve as cautionary tales. I wrote the Parable books because of the direction of the country. You can call it save the world fiction, but it clearly doesn’t save anything.
I don’t think that we necessarily lie. I mean, we make our living by pretending that we’re someone else. I don’t tell tall tales. I always tell the truth.
Cautionary tales were fantastic in the ’70s.
There seems to be a real taste for the fantastical these days. People like to get back into their imaginations. Maybe there’s something a little nostalgic about ‘Grimm’ and the fairy tales that they grew up with. And it’s a very unique approach to the procedural side of things.
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.
I’m not a fan of Dr. Seuss’s better-known work, but his fables leave me awe-struck. ‘Ten Tall Tales’ is a collection of stories where his trademark anarchy is combined with a tautness of writing that shines an affectionate yet uncompromising spotlight on some of the absurdities of human behaviour.
All love stories are tales of beginnings. When we talk about falling in love, we go to the beginning, to pinpoint the moment of freefall.
Other kids’ parents wouldn’t let them read magazines like ‘Weird Tales,’ but my folks were big readers themselves, so they didn’t mind.
I never read any fairy tales or classics until I was an adult; all we ever had was comics… No television, either. If we wanted entertainment, we hung around the fish shop.
I had to grow up fast because we know it’s not all fairy tales out there; it’s full of rubbish.
Dragons and bridges are very much something out of fairy tales and fantasy.
I was at stage school in Birmingham Rep when I was called down to London for an audition in the National Theatre. Maximilian Schell, the film actor, was casting Tales from the Vienna Woods. He was looking at me for a small, but significant, role.
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 think, in some ways, that is the balm of stories, of fables, of tales: it’s the way we’re wired. We have always needed to distill what we’re going through and try to understand it by looking either backwards or forwards. And the hardest is to look in the now.
I’ve always been a huge fantasy fan. I was always interested in fairy tales and anything with magic or dragons… I was always drawn to those types of stories.
As a story teller I have used characters, epic tales, poetry and rasa in my performances.
It’s really easy, once somebody passes away, for the tales about them to become taller, the good ones and the bad ones.
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.
Modern love – in the movies and music – especially country music – is full of tales of women exacting sweet revenge on the men who done them wrong.
I attended school regularly for three years. I learned to read and write. ‘Lamb’s Tales’ from Shakespeare was my favourite reading matter. I stole, by finding, Palgrave’s ‘Golden Treasury.’ These two books, and the ‘Everyman’ edition of John Keats, were my proudest and dearest possessions, my greatest wealth.
