Definitely they write themselves. It's an amazing experience. It's like the characters have come alive and are sitting on my shoulder talking to me, telling me their tales.
I am 39. I am single. I am a black woman. I have too many advanced degrees. Many a news story tells me finding true love is likely a hopeless proposition. Now is the time when I need to believe in fairy tales.
As social animals, we need to exchange juicy tales about someone - to connect with one another. For millions of years our forebears must have sat around the campfire, whispering about everyone they knew.
Obscure as still remains the origin of that 'genre' of romance to which the tales before us belong, there is little doubt that their models, if not their originals, were once extant at Constantinople.
The naturalist worldview is a good way to feel grounded and feel part of something that isn't based on fairy tales. It's based on observable facts in the human and in the biological history of the planet. I think that can be a source for comfort.
When fairy tales are written in the west, they're known as folklore. In the east, fairy tales are called religions.
My grandmother was born in 1900, and she would regale me with tales I call 'Little House on the Prairie' tales, but they were tales of segregated and racist America growing up in Alabama and Mississippi, where she came from.
Stuff that's truly off-trail was what appealed to 'Weird Tales' editors.
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.
My relationship with Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm reaches far back into my childhood. I grew up with Grimm's fairy tales. I even saw a theater production of 'Tom Thumb' during Advent at the State Theater in Danzig, which my mother took me to see.
I was a great reader of fairy tales. I tried to read the entire fairy tale section of the library.
In fairy tales, the children are saved by caring adults. We need more caring adults in the lives of our children.
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.
All of my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and emotions have no validity or significance in the cosmos-at-large.
I am not sure how much good is done by moralising about fairy tales. This can be unsubtle - telling children that virtue will be rewarded, when in fact it is mostly simply the fact of being the central character that ensures a favourable outcome. Fairy tales are not, on the whole, parables.
Many, whose hearts are conquered by acute spite, roll out balanced tales from their own heart, which do not balance when you weigh words against deeds.
I like the fact that kids are willing to be imaginative and go along with me when I'm telling strange tales.
Cheerfully fessing up to our failures turns crazy mind off, humility and compassion on. I learned this in a karate dojo that had a strange tradition. Everyone there loved recounting failure stories, and after an evening of smacking one another, we'd sit and have a beer while the students swapped tales of martial arts disaster.
I have very happy memories of fairy tales. My mother used to take me to the library in Toronto to check out the fairy tales. And she was an actress, so she used to act out for me the different characters in all these fairy tales.
Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales.
There have been a number of us working very, very hard to bring myth and fairy tales into public consciousness, through fantasy literature and other media. I hope we're succeeding in some small way.
While some of the tales of woe emanating from the court are enough to bring tears to the eyes, it is true that only Supreme Court justices and schoolchildren are expected to and do take the entire summer off.
While Fledging is a different type of book, The Parable series serve as cautionary tales. I wrote the Parable books because of the direction of the country. You can call it save the world fiction, but it clearly doesn't save anything.
I began to believe the fairy tales: You know, how we're all out there looking for our magical missing half.
Fairy tales read before bed tend to make me dream. They're all quite violent stories, as are my dreams.
Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten.
'The Tales' are an important part of 'Hollow City,' when the kids discover secrets encoded in them that end up saving their lives. I wrote two tales as part of 'Hollow City,' and spent the next couple of years finishing the trilogy but itching to write more tales.
On that other novels followed: but I still wrote fairy tales and dreamy poems of another world.
Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased by tales, so is the other.
Assure a man that he has a soul and then frighten him with old wives' tales as to what is to become of him afterward, and you have hooked a fish, a mental slave.
Thanks to nanny, I've got a deep understanding of Russian tales.
If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!
Gifts fall from heaven only in fairy tales.
Eye-popping tales of growing income inequality are hardly new. By now, nearly every American must be painfully aware of the widening pay gap between top executives and shop floor laborers; between 'Master of the Universe' financiers and pretty much everyone else.
I was weaned not on television or Wild West sagas but on stories of nationalism and patriotism. I would sit at my mother's feet by the hour and drink in these exciting tales of the freedom fighters in our family.
My husband and I like to reminisce about how, when we were 9, we read straight through L. Frank Baum's 'Oz' series, books filled with wizards and witches. And you know what those subversive tales taught us? That we loved to read!