Ray Harryhausen Quotes

As a kid, I sat transfixed watching Ray Harryhausen's '7th Voyage of Sinbad.'

I want to make movies just like "King Kong." You know, dinosaurs, big gorillas - it's everything that a nine year-old boy would fall in love with.

Everyone knew what he was thinking. Certainly there were demons in the world. But they were like Tehlu’s angels. They were like heroes and kings. They belonged in stories. They belonged out there. Taborlin the Great called up fire and lightning to destroy demons. Tehlu broke them in his hands and sent them howling into the nameless void. Your childhood friend didn’t stomp one to death on the road to Baedn-Bryt. It was ridiculous.

She always did like tales of adventure-stories full of brightness and darkness. She could tell you the names of all King Arthur's knights, and she knew everything about Beowulf and Grendel, the ancient gods and the not-quite-so-ancient heroes. She liked pirate stories, too, but most of all she loved books that had at least a knight or a dragon or a fairy in them. She was always on the dragon's side by the way.

Orcs, and talking trees, and leagues of grass, and galloping riders, and glittering caves, and white towers and golden halls, and battles, and tall ships sailing, all these passed before Sam's mind.

Asleep in lap of legends old.

I think most musicians know if they make the same record twice, even if they say they don't.

I admired the earnestness of these people, many of whom had joined Greenpeace and marched for noble things in their youth. But I didn’t share their hatred of the establishment. After all, the establishment had given me so many of my favorite things: Nick at Nite, the New York Knicks, Stephen King, Taco Bell, Green Day. The list went on and on.

I got tired of New York. I mean when you grow up somewhere, uh, I just basically wanted something different for myself and if I was planning on having a family.

Maybe New York shouldn't survive. Maybe it should go through a cycle of destruction.

Every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature.

Saudia Arabia takes in half a trillion dollars every year in oil revenue, and the country has a population smaller than New York state, but when your system of government is an eleventh century monarchy, someone's going to end up poor, and it's not gonna be the guy whose first name is King.

There are lots of things in the folklore, like they can only be killed by a silver bullet, that don't realistically work, if you're trying to say they have existed for hundreds of years, unknown.

No man of sense in the whole world believes in devils any more than he does in mermaids, vampires, gorgons, hydras, naiads, dryads, nymphs, fairies, the Fountain of Youth, [or] the Philosopher's Stone. . . .

Myths and legends die hard in America.

I'd love to be able to write crazy epic plots. I'm working on it.

I think 2-D animation disappeared from Disney because they made so many uninteresting films. They became very conservative in the way they created them. It's too bad. I thought 2-D and 3-D could coexist happily.

Fairy tales and myths are forms of cultural storage for the natural history of life.

Percy: The Heka-what? Annabeth: The Hundred-Handed Ones. They called them that because... well, they had a hundred hands. They were the elder brothers of the Cyclopes. Tyson: Very powerful. Wonderful! As tall as the sky. So strong they can break mountains! Percy: Cool. Unless you're a mountain.

I think almost everybody enjoyed fairy tales when they were young, tales of witches and ogres and monsters and dragons and so forth. You get a little bit older, you can't read fairy tales any more.

I am thoroughly tired of the fable style of narrative and shall do my best to get up something entirely different and possibly little more worthy.

Besides, all my New York friends were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or political or psychoanalytical reasons, but Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love.

Well, I'm pretty anti legends - I just don't think they're useful. So that certainly wouldn't be my intention. But will it contribute to that? Sure. Any medicine can be mis-used. But I think that there is a great courage, innocence and magic to him that more than a legend is about connection.

I am the only living person in the English speaking world who didn't have the Narnia books as a child.