What I love about jazz is that it's full of legends, full of myths. It's an oral history because it started in New Orleans and Kansas City, under the radar.
The logical man must either deny all miracles or none, and our American Indian myths and hero stories are perhaps, in themselves, quite as credible as those of the Hebrews of old.
We are all affected by the time we are born into, and of course that feeds into your work. Society is based on storytelling - religious myths, opera, film - and 1968 was always seen as a time of rupture and fragmentation. I have always been interested in those words.
If our titles recall the known myths of antiquity, we have used them again because they are the eternal symbols upon which we must fall back to express basic psychological ideas.
Myths can't be translated as they did in their ancient soil. We can only find our own meaning in our own time.
Congress acknowledged that society's accumulated myths and fears about disability and disease are as handicapping as are the physical limitations that flow from actual impairment.
I'm interested in authentic experience and the essence of that creative place, and where those myths begin and where they become real on any level.
We obsess about celebrities. We create them, build myths around them, and then hunt them and destroy them. I don't know where it's taking us or what it means, but I know we do it. I have seen a lot of it myself.
My first mentor and inspiration was my Irish Dancing teacher Patricia Mulholland. She created her own form of dance known as Irish ballet and created stage productions of old Irish myths and legends. They were my first experiences on stage. She told my mum I was destined for the stage, and I took that as my cue.
The higher Greek poetry did not make up fictitious plots; its business was to express the heroic saga, the myths.
As I detail in my new book: 'Hard Measures, How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives,' there are many myths surrounding the detention of a relatively small number of top terrorists at CIA-run 'black sites' from 2002 until they were sent to Guantanamo Bay in 2006.
The more real things get, the more like myths they become.
The dogma of woman's complete historical subjection to men must be rated as one of the most fantastic myths ever created by the human mind.
All myths that are something more than fancies gain rather than lose in value with time, by reason of the accretions of human experience.
Myths are part of our DNA. We're a civilisation with a continuous culture. The effort to modernize it keeps it alive. Readers connect with it.
I decided to write about the myths of divorce.
Distinctly American poetry is usually written in the context of one's geographic landscape, sometimes out of one's cultural myths, and often with reference to gender and race or ethnic origins.
The nomads' egalitarian lifestyle astonished the Greeks, who kept their own women indoors weaving and minding children. The exotic Scythian lifestyle fueled the Greek imagination and led to an outpouring of myths about fierce Amazons, 'the equals of men.'
I tend to think of a myth and then explore how it would play out if it were happening in the modern-day world. I modify all the myths I use, but I stick very closely to their structure - it is the hidden teacher in me.
We hunger to understand, so we invent myths about how we imagine the world is constructed - and they're, of course, based upon what we know, which is ourselves and other animals. So we make up stories about how the world was hatched from a cosmic egg or created after the mating of cosmic deities or by some fiat of a powerful being.
We tend to think of divorced or complicated families as a modern invention, and that is not at all true. You only have to read the Greek myths to see broken homes, widows, divorce, stepchildren, children trying to get along with new parents.
With each film, I get more and more involved and it's more and more time-consuming. Also, I like to break myths and people's preconceived ideas. My characters have always stood for something, have always had an opinion, although they've never really rebelled.
I truly appreciate the special qualities that America and American national myths offer me.
The power of the print reviewer is one of those urban myths. There have always been shows that slipped under the critical radar to become popular successes: 'Tobacco Road', 'Abie's Irish Rose' and our old friend 'Spider-Man', which got the worst reviews in theatre history and is still apparently going strong.
A good nationalism has to depend on a principle of the common people, on myths of a struggling commonality.
If historians don't tell stories at the scales of creation myths, someone else will.
I cannot live on myths; somehow, science convinces me more easily. I am prone to lean towards science, ethics, and philosophy rather than myth, religion, and rituals.
When I went through my eating disorder, I never sought medical assistance. I created myths in my head about how I should get through things, so the idea that I could surround myself with truth and feel comfortable enough to speak mine allowed me to breathe.
If you look back at the great classics and the epics and myths, they were for everyone. Different people got different things from them, but everyone was invited to participate.
Donald Trump's whole candidacy from the time he started has been filled with myths by the media that he couldn't - he was not a serious candidate.
It takes a very strong brain to resist the absolutes, the myths that the media and the politicians peddle - the idea that if you are too kind, where does it all end? That not to help someone is somehow a good idea.
Because I was an only, I had more things, and I remember early on the kick I got from giving stuff away. Despite all the myths about only children not being able to share, actually I've never knowingly met a stingy one.
Horrors, I believe, should be original - the use of common myths and legends being a weakening influence.
I don't care what people's myths are about me.
Mythology works... because Indians have been bred on myths.
Folk tales and myths, they've lasted for a reason. We tell them over and over because we keep finding truths in them, and we keep finding life in them.