Traditional Tales Quotes

What I find interesting about folklore is the dialogue it gives us with storytellers from centuries past.

Myth is, after all, the neverending story.

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

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.

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

The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.

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.

I've always admired the tradition of storytellers who sat in the public market and told their stories to gathered crowds. They'd start with a single premise and talk for hours - the notion of one story, ever-changing but never-ending.

I have a bit of a love affair with fairy tales and some of the ideas of Irish mythology, like Oscar Wilde and W.B. Yeats, who captured a lot of that very beautifully.

There's so many versions of 'Red Riding Hood.' It goes back 700 years.

I'm an old storyteller. I tell the story. It's about the story.

Many of the books I loved as a kid, that even my mother read as a child, are very slow going. Today's children are not as patient. The best example of this is 'The Secret Garden,' which I adored as a child.

All the ancient classic fairy tales have always been scary and dark.

Naanabozho was the first tribal trickster on the earth.

The world knows of a vast stock of epic material scattered up and down the nations; sometimes its artistic value is as extraordinary as its archaeological interest, but not always.

I mentioned before, these [classic Disney films] are classic mythological tales, a hero's journey, and have been told for thousands of years. Disney has updated them, and made them accessible for us.

A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence.

People tend to think of fairy tales as 'archetypal.' They are also extremely sensual, something which translates well over the ages.

One of the pleasures of the original 'Grimm's Fairy Tales' is how incredibly ghastly they are. The ugly sisters have their eyes pecked out by crows.

For the spell is older than experience. For the tale is older than the record.

When I was young, I read everything I could lay my hands on, but the Scots in my storybooks spent their time fighting glorious battles, rowing across lochs, or escaping over moors of purple heather. Even those Scots were hard to find. For at school, we recited poetry according to the set texts the teachers taught us.

The fact that The Bridge contains folk lore and other material suitable to the epic form need not therefore prove its failure as a long lyric poem, with interrelated sections.

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.

I've always been interested in oral traditions and mythological stories and legends from antiquity that have to do with nature, attempts to explain mysterious or puzzling, or very striking phenomena from nature. Things that people observed or heard about in nature.

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.