Roger Ross Williams Quotes

I get a lot of inspiration from research in mythology and folklore. I find that, you know, stories people told each other thousands of years ago are still relevant now.

There's a great tradition in storytelling that's thousands of years old, telling stories about kings and their palaces, and that's really what I wanted to do.

Legends are all to do with the past and nothing to do with the present.

I like mythology - anything historical.

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.

Most of the monsters... are based on some sort of mythology. Every culture and even some geographical areas have monsters and mythology that is their own.

The Celtic folk-tales have been collected while the practice of story-telling is still in full vigour, though there is every sign that its term of life is already numbered.

If you read the fables, 'Beowulf,' for example, you will know something about the person who writes them, and I like that. Secondly, they will not be about individuals; they will be about community. Thirdly, they're all about moralizing. Fourthly, the way they express themselves takes its tone from the oral tradition.

What the Greeks and Romans considered myths, we consider fairy tales. We can see how very clearly the myths, which emanated from all cultures, had a huge influence on the development of the modern fairy tale.

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 bearers of fables are very welcome.

Oral storytelling goes back so long ago, and those stories that were told orally were always layered and changed with time.

When fairy tales are written in the west, they're known as folklore. In the east, fairy tales are called religions.

I've always been fascinated by the grassroots folktale level of a culture, and as a storyteller, I have to follow what seems to be leading me on.

To tell the truth, fairytales have never gone out of style. They have been told and retold for thousands of years, finding new shapes and structures with each new generation of tellers.

They were kind of like little Stephen King stories... but these go back many hundreds of years.

Fairy tales are with us day in and day out, not just in commercials, but references in the theater, movies, museums, schools, etc.

I don't know that movies are important. But I know that stories are important. Movies may disappear. They've only been around, for God's sake, for the last hundred years... I think that it's the need to tell stories, and that people need to be told stories. It's the old sitting around the fire, you know.

I think of myself... as a troubadour, a village storyteller, the guy in the shadows of the campfire.

I wanted to connect a modern story with a myth that I had read.

No matter what you write, you actually can't help retelling a fairy tale somewhere along the way.

Throughout history, story telling was at the very beginning of life.

Myths are stories that express meaning, morality or motivation. Whether they are true or not is irrelevant.

If you look at any ancient civilization, they've all used fantasy stories to train the young.

I love studying folklore and legends. The stories that people passed down for a thousand years without any sort of marketing support are obviously saying something appealing about the basic human condition.