James Lapine Quotes

Fairly tales are myths, and myths are only myths because there's a grain of truth in them.

What works about fairy tales is that they endure, and the great thing about fairy tales is that you can explore big, epic things that you can't really explore in other situations.

People tend to think of fairy tales as 'archetypal.' They are also extremely sensual, something which translates well over the ages.

I think people should read fairy tales, because we're hungry for a mythology that will speak to our fears.

I love fantasy. I grew up reading fantasy.

I'm fascinated with the stories that we tell. Real histories become fantasies and fairy tales, morality tales and fables. There's something interesting and funny and perverse about the way fairytale sometimes passes for history, for truth.

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 fantasy genre has so far rather embraced me, and I'm incredibly grateful for that.

I am attracted to myths.

I grew up with a lot of fairy tales. And they had an essence of darkness to them.

A myth is far truer than a history, for a history only gives a story of the shadows, whereas a myth gives a story of the substances that cast the shadows.

The narrative of so many fairy tales are timeless in so many different cultures, and they have been since the dawn of man. They represent escapism, but they all feature themes that have such poignancy in a modern world.

We actually say in 'Nightbreed,' 'God is an astronaut, Oz is over the rainbow, and Midian is where the monsters go.' There's a lovely sense in which there's a simple thesis being played out here. These are things you understand as a child out on the play yard.

The fairy tale, which to this day is the first tutor of children because it was once the first tutor of mankind, secretly lives on in the story. The first true storyteller is, and will continue to be, the teller of fairy tales. Whenever good counsel was at a premium, the fairy tale had it, and where the need was greatest, its aid was nearest. This need was created by myth. The fairy tale tells us of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare which myth had placed upon its chest.

A wonder tale can be truer than true," I said. I had learned (...) that the deepest kind of truth can be found in the strangest and wildest of stories. One may not meet a fire-breathing dragon on the way to the well. One may not encounter an army of toothed snakes in the woodshed. That does not make the wisdom in those tales any less real.

Well, Company of Wolves was about that literally, about fairy tales.

Fairy tales are with us day in and day out, not just in commercials, but references in the theater, movies, museums, schools, etc.

No matter what you write, you actually can't help retelling a fairy tale somewhere along the way.

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

Dragons and bridges are very much something out of fairy tales and fantasy.

My interests were in fantasy more than comics growing up.

In kindergarten that used to be my job, to tell them fairytales. I liked Hans Christian Andersen, and the Grimm fairy tales, all the classic fairy tales.

I was a great reader of fairy tales. I tried to read the entire fairy tale section of the library.

I don't feel there's a difference between the real world and the fairy-tale world. They contain psychological truths and, I guess, projections of what the culture that tells them thinks about various things: men, women, aging, dying - the most basic aspects of being human.

Fairy tales and folk tales have always played a role in my writing in one way or another.