I found a lot of fairy tales scary. They really didn’t sit well with me.
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.
Oh, gosh, I have always been a huge fan of horror since I was a child. I know this is going to sound really weird, but I think it started with fairy tales.
‘Robopocalypse’ joins a proud tradition of techno-apocalyptic tales, stretching from high-flying Icarus, to Frankenstein’s monster, and to many a giant radioactive creature who has crashed the streets of Tokyo. And then, of course, there’s the Terminator.
Folk tales, fairy tales, religion, the occult – these are the things I’m most passionate about, even more than cinema. And I’m very passionate about cinema.
My grandmother was born in 1900, and she would regale me with tales I call ‘Little House on the Prairie’ tales, but they were tales of segregated and racist America growing up in Alabama and Mississippi, where she came from.
For so long, I just let people surmise what they would about my life and my choices, and other people have written books and told tales.
I began to believe the fairy tales: You know, how we’re all out there looking for our magical missing half.
I think there are more good sportswriters doing more good sportswriting than ever before. But I also believe that the one thing that’s largely gone out is what made sport such fertile literary territory – the characters, the tales, the humor, the pain, what Hollywood calls ‘the arc.’
The first science fiction show on television was ‘Tales Of Tomorrow’ using scripts from the radio show ‘X-1’ which used stories from ‘Galaxy Magazine’ as its source material.
I am well-nigh resolv’d to write no more tales but merely to dream when I have a mind to, not stopping to do anything so vulgar as to set down the dream for a boarish Publick.
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.
As social animals, we need to exchange juicy tales about someone – to connect with one another. For millions of years our forebears must have sat around the campfire, whispering about everyone they knew.
I firmly believe in real-life fairy tales.
As I was writing, I realised I wasn’t sufficiently extrovert to gather enough interesting souls with tall tales around me. I was no Louis Theroux. But neither was I interested in exploring my inner life in public, in the manner of a Jonathan Raban.
While some of the tales of woe emanating from the court are enough to bring tears to the eyes, it is true that only Supreme Court justices and schoolchildren are expected to and do take the entire summer off.
The world of religion isn’t a logical world; that’s why children like it. It’s a world of worked-out fantasies, very similar to children’s stories or fairy tales.
Fairytales were never really meant for children; they were meant as cautionary tales for teenagers on the verge of growing up.
All of my work is influenced by fairy tales, and I hope my work shows Hans Christian Anderson’s influence.
Just about every science whiz can tell you how he or she took apart the TV or the radio when they were kids just to see how it worked. To see what the world was made of. Well, when I was a kid, I took apart fairy tales to see how they worked. To see what the world was made of.
I think it’s really hard to draw a hard-and-fast line and say ‘Grimm’s Fairy Tales’ doesn’t count as science fiction or fantasy. Or at what point do we say mythology is not fantasy, so reading mythology when you’re young does not count as an exposure to fantasy?
It wasn’t until I was an adult reader that I began to fathom the influence of fairy tales on writers I was in love with over the years, from Louisa May Alcott to Bernard Malamud to John Cheever to Anne Frank to Joy Williams.
For me, I’ve always been fascinated by tales of the Chinese railroad and the workers and the conditions of the workers who built the railroad.
I can tell you all kinds of moral tales, but fashion and reality are vaguely different.
I didn’t like fairy tales when I was younger. I found a lot of fairy tales scary. They really didn’t sit well with me.
Tales of power and ambition and intrigue and betrayal and desire – when you’re telling those in a big way, you automatically want to go to Shakespeare.
If you look at the beginning of children’s entertainment in literature, the first books that were written for kids were cautionary tales. They were books that were there to teach kids about growing up and how to live life.
I loved fairy tales as a kid, so that’s where my mind gravitates.
I’m Jewish, I can say it. We’re storytellers. We were the moneylenders… Therefore we tell great tales to get what we need. I love Jewish men. They make the best husbands.
There’s a long history of anthropomorphic animals in Japanese literature. The so-called ‘funny animal scrolls’ were the first narratives in Japanese history, and the heroes of many folk tales have animals as their companions.
It was only after the Grimms published two editions primarily for adults that they changed their attitude and decided to produce a shorter edition for middle-class families. This led to Wilhelm’s editing and censoring many of the tales.
What works about fairy tales is that they endure, and the great thing about fairy tales is that you can explore big, epic things that you can’t really explore in other situations.
I did my acting performance in ‘Roger Rabbit.’ I think I did a voice-over also in ‘Osmosis Jones’ and I directed an episode of my show years ago, ‘Tales from the Crypt’ and that’s my endeavors in the non-producer oriented ranks.
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.
Fairy tales and folk tales are part of the DNA of all stories and great fun to write.
There have been a number of us working very, very hard to bring myth and fairy tales into public consciousness, through fantasy literature and other media. I hope we’re succeeding in some small way.
Fairy tales cross generational lines, and how you respond to them depends on when in your life you’re seeing them.
I liked Latin, I like languages, I liked all the myths, and the Roman tales that we were required to translate in Latin, and all these interesting people who were never quite what they thought they would be or seemed to be.
We didn’t have any books at home. Not even children’s books or fairy tales. The only ‘fantastic’ stories came from religion class. And I took them all very literally, that God sees everything, and so I felt I was always being watched. Or that dead people were in Heaven right over our village.
While many alternate reality stories ask, ‘What might have been?’ parallel universe stories literalize the war between good and evil that plays inside each of us every day. It’s what makes this type of story so perfect for many fantasy tales: we’re all just a coin flip away from being entirely different people.
Gifts fall from heaven only in fairy tales.
I loved reading Grimm’s fairy tales and Hans Christian Andersen, and I loved to dream about other worlds and other lives. Maybe that has something to do with having an incomplete family, being an only child. All I know is I loved to pretend, and all that was in tandem with my wanting to be an actress.
The Islamic terror threat is so fierce, unrelenting and barbaric that we tell ourselves fairy tales about how these ruthless acts are anything but what they are: acts of war.
My father loved biographies. He loved the true tales of interesting people that were shaping our culture. I get why he dug ‘Vanity Fair.’ You feel smarter, somehow, for reading it.
I’ve always been a happy-go-lucky person. I haven’t got any dark tales, I didn’t draw on my own past, I’m from a very normal stable background and had an amazing childhood, and I haven’t got any complaints really.
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.
Those of us who can remember our childhoods will recall how ardently we relished the moment of the bedtime story, when our mother or father would sit down beside us in the semi-dark and read from a book of fairy tales.
If Queen Amezan and Queen Penthesilea could somehow meet in real life, they would recognize each other as sister Amazons. Two tales, two storytellers, two sites far apart in time and place, and yet one common tradition of women who made love and war.
‘Harat’ is actually – it’s a Lebanese dialect word. It comes from ‘the mapmaker,’ somebody who makes a map. And it basically means somebody who tells fibs or exaggerate tales a little bit.
I used to tell strange, wild, improbable tales akin to ghost stories, and discovered a taste for spinning yarns.
