Mythologizing Quotes

It's really easy, once somebody passes away, for the tales about them to become taller, the good ones and the bad ones.

By the time Florence Nightingale got her neurotic hands on Cleopatra, she had been mangled beyond recognition by both history and literature.

People tend to romanticize this job. So, it's fun to let the air out of it.

The mythologizing of our role in Watergate has gone to the point of absurdity, where journalists write in reviews of this book that I, single-handedly, brought down Richard Nixon. Totally absurd.

Reagan has been deified by the Republican Party, which is odd. The Reagan that modern Republicans revere is not the real Reagan.

A lot of ink is given over to mythologizing female friendships as curious, fragile relationships that are always intensely fraught. Stop reading writing that encourages this mythology.

It's funny how the ruthless, murderous gangster has really been romanticized by the media. I mean, I grew up watching the 'Godfathers' and 'Scarface,' and they were the coolest. They're just really interesting stories with great characters. They're rock stars.

When I'm singing 'Deanna,' for example, which I sing pretty much every night, it brings forward a kind of imagined, romanticized lie about this particular person, which I find really comforting and exciting to sing about.

We tend to think of our idols as kind of superheroes; maybe less so today, given that people have a tendency to overshare on social media, but when I was growing up, all you knew about these people was what they allowed you to see - which was them doing superhuman things, up on stage in an arena with all these people going crazy.

What if tomorrow someone digs up definitive proof that Jesus had a real, earthly, biological father named Larry, and archeologists find Larry's tomb and do DNA samples and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the virgin birth was just a bit of mythologizing the Gospel writers threw in to appeal to the followers of the Mithra and Dionysian religious cults that were hugely popular at the time of Jesus, whose gods had virgin births? Could you still be a Christian? Is the way of Jesus still the best possible way to live?

We all mythologize to some degree ourselves and probably embellish. I think some of that is the desire to tell stories.

It's so easy to fetishise the dead. We rose-tint or villainise them, and so often in the retelling they are saints or sinners, rather than flawed humans muddling along like the rest of us.

Obviously, in journalism, you're confined to what happens. And the tendency to embellish, to mythologize, it's in us. It makes things more interesting, a closer call. But journalism taught me how to write a sentence that would make someone want to read the next one.

That kind of creaming off the pretty postcard image of the past, I think, is a road to nowhere.

Everyone thinks that Prince and I had a beautiful, romantic love affair, but we didn't. We just let people think that in order to promote 'Purple Rain.'

Hollywood versions of watershed moments in American history are generally high-minded shlock. 'JFK,' 'The People vs. Larry Flynt,' even 'Lincoln': all of these boast excellent performances in scripts that are ultimately very conventional, even conservative.

The real Mary Poppins got lost when Hollywood turned her into a cream puff.

I think also there's no question that Lincoln has been diluted down through history in some way, almost by becoming as iconic as he is, in a way he's become diluted.

I think all of us ordinary mortals tend to mythologize people as good-looking as you.

In asking forgiveness of women for our mythologizing of their bodies, for being unreal about them, we can only appeal to their own sexuality, which is different but not basically different, perhaps, from our own. For women, too, there seems to be that tangle of supplication and possessiveness, that descent toward infantile undifferentiation, that omnipotent helplessness, that merger with the cosmic mother-warmth, that flushed pulse-quickened leap into overestimation, projection, general mix-up.

In a sense, you're always mythologizing your life; it's always an effort to make yourself epic. At least in fiction you can lie and sort of justify your delusion about your "epicness." But when you're writing a memoir, you're trying to make your life epic and it's not - nobody's life is.