American Folklore Quotes

Imagine an American Hans Christian Andersen, conceive of the Brothers Grimm living in Missouri, and you will approximate Howard Schwartz, a fable-maker and fable-gatherer seduced by the uncanny and the unearthly. In Lilith's Cave, he once again reaches into a magical cornucopia of folklore and fantasy and spreads before us, in enchanting language, the marvels and shocks of dybbuks, ghosts, demons, spirits, and wizards.

I've had a lifelong obsession with urban legends and American folklore.

No cowboys for Canada. Canada got Mounties instead - Dudley Do-Right, not John Wayne. It's a mind-set of "Here I come to save the day" versus "Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker.

If two New Hampshiremen aren't a match for the devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians.

I've always been interested in the Southwest. There isn't a place in the world you can go where they don't know about cowboys and Indians and the myth of the West.

In the future, hip-hop is going to be called American folklore.

he cut through the 21st Century Gallery, past the big plastic statues of Pluto and Mickey, animal headed gods of lost America

America is a great story and there is a river on every page of it.

You might be a redneck if you have every episode of Hee Haw on tape.

Alan [Lomax] and his father started off changing the definition of folk music from something ancient and anonymous to something very contemporary.

Rip Van Winkle, who said, Don't make the bed; I'm just going to the bathroom. Never got a dinner!

Any nobody from the folk blues world could avoid being influenced by Woody Guthrie, who is actually of Scottish-Irish ancestry.

I may not have the gun that Jesse James had when he was gunned down, but if there's a piece identified with him and the same place, then I get interested; it's always excited me.

Nobody in America, in the modern generation, has read their mythology or legends.

I like to talk about America. It's so mysterious.

Porter Rockwell was that most terrible instrument that can be handled by fanaticism; a powerful physical nature welded to a mind of very narrow perceptions, intense convictions, and changeless tenacity. In his build he was a gladiator; in his humor a Yankee lumberman; in his memory a Bourbon; in his vengeance an Indian. A strange mixture, only to be found on the American continent

So I live in Los Angeles, and it's kind of a goofy place. They have an airport named after John Wayne. That ought to explain it. It has a charming kind of superstitious innocence.

The reason I wouldn't dare to write a Western is simply because that seems to be so much a part of American culture. Maybe if I want to write a Western enough I should try to overcome that fear, but I'll certainly feel like I'm trespassing. I feel that that is so much a part of American foundation myth, it's part of the myth of America, the American vision of what America is, which people have glorified and then challenged and then vilified.

There are two ways to look at the Alamo—through the eyes of history and through the eyes of myth, and I found that myth wins out pretty much every time.

Look at Walter Huston in The Devil and Daniel Webster: It's an incredible performance.

Johnny Appleseed was revered . . he was . . . an evangelist (of a doctrine veering perilously close to pantheism).

I love songs about horses, railroads, land, Judgment Day, family, hard times, whiskey, courtship, marriage, adultery, separation, murder, war, prison, rambling, damnation, home, salvation, death, pride, humor, piety, rebellion, patriotism, larceny, determination, tragedy, rowdiness, heartbreak and love. And Mother. And God.

Listen my children and you shall hear, Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere

I never stopped thinking about the Alamo from that day to this. I'm a huge collector of memorabilia. I've got Davy Crockett's bullet pouch. I've got Colonel Travis's belt.

You might be a redneck if you've ever stood in line to get your picture taken with a freak of nature.