Michael Morpurgo Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

I'll be left writing picture books and fairy tales.

I was reading my son some fables; it made for good nighttime reading. These stories were very vivid and very strange and occasionally bizarrely violent. It was a very free landscape.

My parents told me any and every fairy-tale from all around the world. I usually gravitated towards ones with interesting, strong heroines.

From as far back as I can remember, I always loved the King Arthur stories, fairy tales, mythology - things like that. So it was very natural for me when I came to write the 'Prydain' books to sort of follow that direction.

Fairy tales cross generational lines, and how you respond to them depends on when in your life you're seeing them.

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.

I've always been fascinated by the grassroots folktale level of a culture, and as a storyteller, I have to follow what seems to be leading me on.

'Fire and Hemlock' is the reason I'm a writer.

All of my work is influenced by fairy tales, and I hope my work shows Hans Christian Anderson's influence.

I think that writers of literary fiction would do well to read more books for children.

If you look at any ancient civilization, they've all used fantasy stories to train the young.

Humankind has been telling stories forever and will be telling stories forever.

When my sister and I were very young, my father used to tell us fairy stories that he'd made up. My mother was always telling him that he should write them down, but he would say, 'Well, they've all been done before. There are so many blooming books in the world - why should I write another one?'

Nothing I had written before 'Mary Poppins' had anything to do with children, and I have always assumed, when I thought about it at all, that she had come out of the same wall of nothingness as the poetry, myth and legend that had absorbed me all my writing life.

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

I think the story is the most ancient form of human entertainment.

When I was little, I made up my own fairy tales, and the ghostly echo of 'Once upon a time' shapes all the fiction I've ever written.

Why do fairy tales exist, and why do movies exist? Why do novels exist? There has to be a reason for it; otherwise, none of these things would be there.

I'm not writing fairy tales or object lessons.

Fairy-tales are nice.

I have a daughter, Hanna, and I never read fairy tales to her. But I did tell her bedtime tales and made up many tales involving 'Gory the Goblin' and other creatures that I borrowed from the Grimms' tales and other tales I knew.