Kenneth Branagh Quotes

Mythology does not interest me. Nor does history. But the possible overlap between history and mythology excites me immensely.

Myths are stories that express meaning, morality or motivation. Whether they are true or not is irrelevant.

All myths that are something more than fancies gain rather than lose in value with time, by reason of the accretions of human experience.

I love studying folklore and legends. The stories that people passed down for a thousand years without any sort of marketing support are obviously saying something appealing about the basic human condition.

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

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

Folktales are real.

As you study vampire legend throughout history, it goes back to almost every culture. South Africa, Indonesia, crazy places have that legend and that idea of immortality.

Any consideration of the story we call 'Cinderella' for simplicity's sake must acknowledge that 'Cinderella' has had a dizzying array of personae over hundreds of years, in several cultures. There is no one authoritative tale of 'Cinderella,' only a hall of mirrors with a different face in each reflection.

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.

A nation that has no music and no fairytales is a tragedy.

A good story never dies.

I want to link together ancient forms of storytelling and the future.

The old storytellers took the stories that meant something to them and rearranged the pieces to say something.

I think, culturally, stories are important, whether it be cinema, whether it be by word of mouth - which I don't even know if we do anymore, as it all seems to be social media.

I learned that myth doesn’t mean a lie; it means a traditional story that tells you something about people and their worldview and what they hold sacred. Interesting.

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

I'm an atheist, a devout atheist, but I find religion fascinating. Primarily because of cultural references, as in: This is what we grew up with. Both on a personal level and a collective level.

The more one knows fairy tales the less fantastical they appear; they can be vehicles of the grimmest realism, expressing hope against all the odds with gritted teeth.

Because the great thing about fairy tales and folk tales is that there is no authentic text. It's not like the text of Paradise Lost or James Joyce's Ulysses, and you have to adhere to that exact text.

The great thing about fairy tales and folk tales is that there is no authentic text.

No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments. Fictions serve as well as facts.

I wasn't into Tolkien at school really. But the story is timeless, the themes that it touches on are contained in cultures all around the world. The innocent on a quest, the pretender, an inanimate object that holds evil - it's really strange that these themes are there in so many different countries' folklore.

After all, I believe that legends and myths are largely made of 'truth'.