Helen Oyeyemi Quotes

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.

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

Each time I'm starting to work on a film, even if I love to settle the plot in the real world, I start to think about the plot as a fairy tale, or a dream, or a nightmare... As if it was the best way to tell the truth about characters or narration, instead of realism.

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.

Fairy tales are really violent, the original ones.

I like that 'once upon a time' quality, where the telling of a tale has an elevated sense of story. There's a whimsical quality to it. Sometimes in fairy tales more things seem possible, even though often they're real world based.

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

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

Fairytales were maps formed of blood and hair and bones; they were the knots of the sub-conscious unwound. Every word in every tale was real and as true as apples and stones. They all led to the story inside the story.

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

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

The thing is, fairytales were once a very gritty way for people to dialogue about aspects of life.

As a child, I loved fairy tales because the story, the what-comes-next, is paramount. As an adult, I'm fascinated by their logic and illogic.

I'm not writing fairy tales or object lessons.

In terms of the mechanics of story, myth is an intriguing one because we didn't make myth up; myth is an imprinture of the human condition.

I liked Hans Christian Andersen because the tales were so dark and tragic.

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.

Comic-book movies are mythology, in a way, and there are a lot more parallels in them with what's going on in the real world than people want to discuss.

Good sci-fi and fantasy use fantastical situations to represent real-life issues. It really is all a metaphor for what we all go through as humans.

I love fairy tales because I think that behind fairy tales, there is always a meaning.

I love stories, I love myths, I love fairytales, I love Kafka.

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

You're never going to kill storytelling, because it's built into the human plan. We come with it.

Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary 'real' world.

Why should a horror film be just a horror film? To me, The Company of Wolves is a fairy tale; it's got all those elements plus a lot more. And we know that fairy tales aren't innocent any more.