Neurologists say that our brains are programmed much more for stories than for abstract ideas. Tales with a little drama are remembered far longer than any slide crammed with analytics.
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.
Many, whose hearts are conquered by acute spite, roll out balanced tales from their own heart, which do not balance when you weigh words against deeds.
All these tales of people sitting down and composing symphonies just as though they were writing a letter are very much exaggerated; at least, it isn’t that way in my work.
We may have forgotten how to feel. Nobody is teaching us how to live happily ever after, as we’ve heard in fairy tales.
Plato found fault that the poets of his time filled the world with wrong opinions of the gods, making light tales of that unspotted essence, and therefore would not have the youth depraved with such opinions.
I like the fact that kids are willing to be imaginative and go along with me when I’m telling strange tales.
It is in your DNA to love a good story. You know, neat tales with heroes and villains and conflicts to resolve. A good story pushes our buttons, is exciting and memorable.
I was a great reader of fairy tales. I tried to read the entire fairy tale section of the library.
I find campfire stories and urban legends are kind of the bread and butter that inspires a lot of people who are making horror and thriller. There is a nugget of truth behind these sort of cautionary tales.
After an 18-year career, I left the film industry, not wanting to become one of those child-actor cautionary tales.
Researching real history has taught me to be bolder and more imaginative in building fantasy worlds and writing fantasy characters, to seek out the margins of history and the forgotten tales that illuminate the whole, complex truth of our flawed yet wondrous nature as a species.
There are a whole lot of little tales told in ‘Presumed Innocent,’ whether it’s about the Hobberly kid, who was an important witness who ends up assassinated, or an accountant named Marcy Lupino, who meets a horrible fate in a state penitentiary. There’s less of that in ‘Innocent,’ and deliberately so.
It is said the boundless steppes of Asia gave flight to tales of heroes and heroines because the conditions there are so harsh.
I think, reading the Grimm’s fairy tales, they all have some sort of moral component to them, teaching you a lesson.
Ego is certainly there in many of the greatest and most dizzying tales of success – but it’s there in some of the greatest stories of failure and self-implosion as well.
If you want to tell grown-up fairy tales, you have to look for the dark side.
I liked Hans Christian Andersen because the tales were so dark and tragic.
That went on for a long time: telling various tales from my experience being anorexic and bulimic, and having people say, ‘You’ve got to write this; you are a writer,’ and me not knowing how to approach the material.
I am thrilled to get the chance to write comics – and to tell Forgotten Realms tales, to boot!
He who would tell divers tales must know how to vary the tune.
Apparently I’m well-known for my stories, my raconteur tales, that sort of thing.
I’m not certain that I draw from any one culture more than others. Many myths and legends of many different cultures are really the same story when you get to the heart of it. They are often cultural cautionary tales about how we should behave and how we should live.
I liked Art Linkletter’s way of conducting an interview while still keeping it light and I even admired Jack Bailey, host of ‘Queen for a Day.’ Particularly fascinating was how he could listen to all those awful tales of woe, then smile and slap someone on the back and declare her Queen for a Day.
When I wrote the eight fairy tales that appear in ‘Horse, Flower, Bird’ I was working toward a completely new form of artistic expression, trying to create a new kind of tale that also felt vintage: innocent and childlike, but haunted. I tried to write a picture-less picture book.
I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the Second World War.
I love monsters, I love creatures, I love beings, I love aliens. That’s more supernatural and more the stuff of fairy tales. Fairy tales are as ancient as we are. I love those stories. I think they’re really interesting because they always have more than simply the fright aspect. There’s something deeply psychological.
I can just remember the blitz of Manchester, or perhaps my father’s tales about the blitz of Manchester. I can remember the blackout, the powdered eggs, and the gas masks. But I think no British person should pretend that being resident in England could count as being in the thick of the action.
The words ‘fairy tales’ must accordingly be taken to include tales in which occurs something ‘fairy,’ something extraordinary – fairies, giants, dwarfs, speaking animals.
I grew up on DC Comics, moral tales where the bad guys got their comeuppance. To me the gory panels or grotesque stuff just made me chuckle.
To get a child’s trust – you may know or not – is a very hard thing to do. They’re so used to not believing adults – because adults tell tales and lies all the time.
With ‘Stardust’, I hope what I was doing is giving 30-year-olds and 40-year-olds and 25-year-olds and 60-year-olds a chance to get the same sense of wonder, the same feeling, the same magic, that they got in reading the classic fairy tales as children.
I liked that sort of thing, those one-off stories like ‘Tales of the Unexpected,’ ‘Hammer House of Horror,’ ‘The Twilight Zone’ and ‘Alfred Hitchcock Presents.’
In kindergarten that used to be my job, to tell them fairytales. I liked Hans Christian Andersen, and the Grimm fairy tales, all the classic fairy tales.
Vulgar and obscene, the papers run rumors daily about people in show business, tales of wicked ways and witless affairs.
If you love Tarzan, you can read stories from the ‘Jungle Tales of Tarzan,’ where he’s just a kid, all the way up until he has a son of his own and beyond. Same with ‘Batman’ – you can follow him from Gotham, as a kid, to ‘Dark Knight,’ as a cranky old weirdo. I really love that.
As a reader, I tend not to get too much from tales of unrelenting grimness.
Everybody in my family were great storytellers. My dad and his brothers would just go on and on; they could tell amazing stories. I think it was something to do with the Celtic, oral storytelling tradition. People very much had that propensity towards telling tales.
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.
The tricks of magic follow the archetypes of narrative fiction – there are tales of creation and loss, death and resurrection, and obstacles that must be overcome.
My father spent his entire early career as an illustrator for comic books: EC Comics like ‘Tales from the Crypt’ and ‘Creepshow,’ then moving on to such magazines as ‘Mad’ and ‘Weird Science.’
One of the best things about folklore and fairy tales is that the best fantasy is what you find right around the corner, in this world. That’s where the old stuff came from.
The theater itself is a lie. Its deaths are mere special effects. Its tales never happened. Even the histories are distorted for dramatic effect. The theater is unnatural, a place of imagination. But the theater tells the audience something true: that the world requires judgments.
Everything starts with fishermen’s tales. Everywhere you go the fishermen talk.
Not all of E. Nesbit’s children’s books are fantasies, but even the most realistic somehow seem magical. In her holiday world, nobody ever goes to school, though all the kids know their English history, Greek myths, and classic tales of derring-do.
I grew up with Bible stories, which are like fairy tales, because my father was a minister. We heard verses and prayers every day. I liked the gorier Bible stories. I did have a book of Chinese fairy tales. All the people except the elders looked like Italians. But we were not a family that had fiction books.
I also like the whole idea of fairy tales and folk tales being a woman’s domain, considered a lesser domain at the time they were told.
Are you used to entertaining everyone with your tales of drama and conflict? Do you get attention and feel important every time you complain about how awful this man is? Stop settling for attention for the negative stuff in your life.
In fairy tales the bad guy is very easy to spot. The bad guy is always wearing a black cape so you always know who he is.
The market for short stories is hard to break into, but a magazine editor isn’t always looking for big names with which to sell his magazine – they’re more willing to try stories by newcomers, if those tales are good.
I feel like the theme song to ‘Duck Tales.’ ‘Life is like a hurricane; it’s a duck blur.’ That’s absolutely what it is.
Fairy tales are stories of triumph and transformation and true love, all things I fervently believe in.
It is not the first duty of the novelist to provide blueprints for insurrection, or uplifting tales of successful resistance for the benefit of the opposition. The naming of what is there is what is important.
