Roger Ross Williams Quotes

I realized that Owen [Suskind] is completely brilliant, because he embraced and memorized all these classic Disney films - these fables that chronicle the hero's journey, and have existed for thousands of years. Owen, in a sense, grew up on a diet of myth and fable, and has become an expert on their themes, which contain a moral guide that connects people.

Nothing in recent years, on television or anywhere else, has improved on a good story that begins "Once upon a time..."

My dad was just a big Joseph Campbell nut.

I love 'Jungle Book' and all the classics growing up, but what I learned about this is that these Disney films are basically classic fables that have been told for thousands of years.

We tell each other stories so we can understand the world better and there's catharsis and we understand the models of what a hero could be and what the hero's journey as a human being is all about. But unfortunately, I think sometimes those stories too can be very prohibitive and confining.

I like narrative storytelling as being part of a tradition, a folk tradition.

There's so many versions of 'Red Riding Hood.' It goes back 700 years.

If you think of all the enduring stories in the world, they're of journeys. Whether it's 'Don Quixote' or 'Ulysses,' there's always this sense of a quest - of a person going away to be tested, and coming back.

I love gothic monsters, but I like to root them more firmly in the traditional folklore from which they sprang. Or at least, I like to evoke the feeling of those folk stories.

The Celtic folk-tales have been collected while the practice of story-telling is still in full vigour, though there is every sign that its term of life is already numbered.

Folktales are real.

If you read the fables, 'Beowulf,' for example, you will know something about the person who writes them, and I like that. Secondly, they will not be about individuals; they will be about community. Thirdly, they're all about moralizing. Fourthly, the way they express themselves takes its tone from the oral tradition.

I believe in mythology. I guess I share Joseph Campbell's notion that a culture or society without mythology would die, and we're close to that.

I get a lot of inspiration from research in mythology and folklore. I find that, you know, stories people told each other thousands of years ago are still relevant now.

I also like the whole idea of fairy tales and folk tales being a woman's domain, considered a lesser domain at the time they were told.

My thoughts fly to the old Icelandic storytellers who created our classics, whose personalities were so bound up with the masses that their names, unlike their lives' work, have not been preserved for posterity.

The world knows of a vast stock of epic material scattered up and down the nations; sometimes its artistic value is as extraordinary as its archaeological interest, but not always.

What the Greeks and Romans considered myths, we consider fairy tales. We can see how very clearly the myths, which emanated from all cultures, had a huge influence on the development of the modern fairy tale.

I must admit to being greatly influenced by Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces.

The journey of Marco Polo is the hero's journey, one that all cultures across the globe can relate to.

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.

Fairytales are stories that span every generation and they've been around for a long time.

What I find interesting about folklore is the dialogue it gives us with storytellers from centuries past.

The constant is always mythologies and the very first stories that we have. All of the movies that last, that you return to, the movies that struck you as a kid and continue to open up to you 10 years later and 10 years after that - those are the movies I want to make. Those things are eternal.