Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

An old art spreading rumours about / Paradise, it begs outside the gates / Of the gods: the active gods come out.

Without monsters and gods, art cannot enact a drama.

Real myths are often strange and startlingly unfamiliar, and don't always give up their meanings easily; you have to tease them out, and for me, that's one of the pleasures of reading older collections of lore.

I went to volcanoes where I knew that there was a lot of mythology around them; there was something like the creation of gods and monsters and demons.

One thing that I get from a lot of people with 'American Gods' is people saying that they would love some kind of glossary with a list of all the Gods and who they are, so that they can look them up.

There's a great tradition in storytelling that's thousands of years old, telling stories about kings and their palaces, and that's really what I wanted to do.

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

I was in my mid-teens when someone gave me a copy of 'Pears Encyclopaedia of Myth and Legends' as a birthday present. It sat on my shelves for many months before I looked at it. When I did, I couldn't stop reading it.

Monsters are evangelical creatures for me.

People tend to associate fairies with princesses, but they couldn't be more different. Princesses have dynastic and domestic pressures, and they get parked on glass hills. Fairies don't have families. They don't clean or cook. They sip nectar from flowers and dance by the light of the moon.

I believe in elves and giants. I believe that fairy tales are nothing more than news reports of what once happened.

If the devil went about doing a tenth of what he is accused of doing he would be poor from paying the blacksmith for ox-shoes for his hooves.

Again, if there are really no fairies, why do people believe in them, all over the world? The ancient Greeks believed, so did the old Egyptians, and the Hindoos, and the Red Indians, and is it likely, if there are no fairies, that so many different peoples would have seen and heard them?

Myths are stories about people who become too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against gods. In crisis their souls are visible.

If swans weren't real myths'd make up.

So you are a vampire." "I most certainly am not." He looked annoyed. "That's such a common phrase, such a cliche, and so unflattering. I suppose you believe in werewolves and aliens too. I blame television.

I have suggested that behind almost all myth lies the mono-plot of the game of hide-and-seek.

The things I encounter that I call elves or gnomes, it's just a gloss. I mean, they're small, and they have the archetype. They're more like leprechauns, and this maybe raises a racial issue.

Fairy tales since the beginning of recorded time, and perhaps earlier, have been “a means to conquer the terrors of mankind through metaphor.

He who has no sympathy with myths has no sympathy with men.

Myth is the hidden part of every story, the buried part, the region that is still unexplored because there are as yet no words to enable us to get there. Myth is nourished by silence as well as by words.

At the centre of every fairy tale lay a truth that gave the story its power

Devils are depicted with bats' wings and good angels with birds' wings, not because anyone holds that moral deterioration would be likely to turn feathers into membrane, but because most men like birds better than bats.

Faeries are equally loyal and deceitful.