Epic Tales Quotes

From time to time there is a move to do a little less in the way of period dramas, but people rebel. Audiences say we want them. There is a big hunger for them. I don't think it's sentimentality or nostalgia, it's often that they are simply the best stories.

Norse mythology is mystifying and fantastic and totally confusing, but you can draw a lot of inspiration from it.

Humankind has been telling stories forever and will be telling stories forever.

God gets the great stories. Novelists must make do with more mundane fictions.

Do we walk in legends or on the green earth in the daylight?' A man may do both,' said Aragorn. 'For not we but those who come after will make the legends of our time. The green earth, say you? That is a mighty matter of legend, though you tread it under the light of day!

There's a wealth of literature out there which, hopefully, will be, you know, exploded in the future, and I personally find it very rewarding to be involved with classic storytelling, and sort of legendary characters.

We need storytelling. Otherwise life just goes on and on, like the number Pi.

I've been familiar with western fantasy novels since I was a boy.

My wife, Lisa, and I both grew up on wuxia - Chinese historical romances. They're kind of analogous to Western epics. They're based on history, just like 'the Iliad' and 'the Odyssey' are based on history, but they're romanticized, and a lot of fantasy elements have been added.

I'm pretty much good at heroic narratives and making people laugh.

'The Mahabharata,' which inspired my novel 'Palace of Illusions,' also has many stories embedded within the main tale.

The greatest art in the world is the art of storytelling.

I love those books like 'Gone with the Wind,' the huge, sweeping family sagas.

I am not against songs in films. We come from an oral tradition of storytelling. I have grown up listening to epics in oral rendition and oral rendition always had music.

When we stop believing in gods we can start believing in their stories, I retort. There are of course no such things as miracles, but if there were and so tomorrow we woke up to find no more believers on earth, no more devout Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, why then, sure the beauty of the stories would be a thing we could focus on because they wouldn't be dangerous any more, they would become capable of compelling the only belief that leads to truth, that is, the willing, disbelieving of the reader in a well-told tale.

My breakthrough as a reader was when I discovered the European adventure story writers - Alexander Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, to name a few.

I'm a great lover of ballads.

Ever since human beings learned to talk to each other, we've been fascinated with storytelling of every kind. Blessed (or cursed) with insatiable curiosity, we have to know what happens next.

I'm a big believer in big books, and that doesn't necessarily mean long books.

NFL Films has had one continuous, creative vision for 47 years. These are timeless things; timeless stories that we capture just like people go back and read Greek mythology.

The pleasure of reading a story and wondering what will come next for the hero is a pleasure that has lasted for centuries and, I think, will always be with us.

Mythology is part of our heritage, part of our identity at times because anywhere in India you will find the name of Rama or Krishna in one or the other form.

Sci-fi gives you the scope to do grand stories.

When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.