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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
On that other novels followed: but I still wrote fairy tales and dreamy poems of another world.
Gifts fall from heaven only in fairy tales.
In the old fairy tales, often a 'moral' was tacked on at the end of the story - say, if a book was going to be marketed to young readers. And the morals don't really suit the stories at all, which makes them super weird - part of why I love the tradition so much. I do play with this, though I am more concerned with ethics than morals.
Soils and national characters differ, but fairy tales are the same in plot and incidents, if not in treatment.
There are recurring elements in popularized fairy tales, such as absent parents, some sort of struggle, a transformation, and a marriage. If you look at a range of stories, you find many stories about marriage, sexual initiation, abandonment. The plots often revolve around what to me seem to be elemental fears and desires.
When I wrote the eight fairy tales that appear in 'Horse, Flower, Bird' I was working toward a completely new form of artistic expression, trying to create a new kind of tale that also felt vintage: innocent and childlike, but haunted. I tried to write a picture-less picture book.
If you want to tell grown-up fairy tales, you have to look for the dark side.
If you read Grimm's fairy tales, they're absolutely terrifying.
Well, Company of Wolves was about that literally, about fairy tales.
If you look at children's stories in fairy tales, they're pretty brutal.
A scientist in his laboratory is not a mere technician: he is also a child confronting natural phenomena that impress him as though they were fairy tales.
When I was little, I made up my own fairy tales, and the ghostly echo of 'Once upon a time' shapes all the fiction I've ever written.
There are people in the world who have skills and strength and talent that I will never have. Never. These notions that you can 'be whatever you want to be as long as you want it bad enough' are not true. They are fairy tales.
Sometimes, violent details have been eliminated from fairy tales simply because they were deemed too graphic. So one does not, at the end of Disney's version of 'Cinderella,' see the stepsisters' eyes get pecked and pecked by doves, because Disney wanted to market the story for wholesome family viewing.
As I read more and more fairy tales as an adult, I found massive collusion between their 'subjects' and those in my fiction: childhood, nature, sexuality, transformation. I realized that it wasn't by accident that I was drawn to their narrative structure and motifs.
Fairy tales and folk tales are part of the DNA of all stories and great fun to write.
I want to tell women that you need to love yourself and make yourself a priority. It's only when you are happy yourself, can you make everyone else around you happy. I am still a dreamer and still believe in fairy tales, but there is only that much one should give another person. You need to keep something for yourself.
I don't know what to think about magic and fairy tales.
When you hear the words 'magic' and 'story', they will probably evoke thoughts of your favourite fairy tales from childhood. Storybook pages abound with all manner of magic: fantastical fairies, wish-granting genies, or even a certain boy wizard.
Sometimes you have to censor books. When I read 'Peter Rabbit,' I skip the part about Peter's father ending up in one of Mrs. McGregor's pies. I also hid the book of 'Grimm Fairy Tales.' They're just too grim for my grandkids. Reality will come soon enough.
To portray an iconic character has been brilliant in itself, and to be able to do that on a show like 'Once Upon a Time' enhances that because the show puts a spin on characters and makes them very different and puts core values that are very different that aren't in the original fairy tales a lot of people relate to.
I've always been a huge fantasy fan. I was always interested in fairy tales and anything with magic or dragons... I was always drawn to those types of stories.
I have been writing fairy tales for as long as I can remember. Not much has changed in terms of my natural attraction to the narrative techniques of fairy tales. My appreciation of them in the traditional stories has deepened, especially of flat and unadorned language, intuitive logic, abstraction, and everyday magic.
I never grew up reading or fantasizing about fairy tales. I was always too busy, like, outside being a kid.
