Michael Moorcock Quotes

Legends are material to be moulded, and not facts to be recorded.

Well, I'm pretty anti legends - I just don't think they're useful. So that certainly wouldn't be my intention. But will it contribute to that? Sure. Any medicine can be mis-used. But I think that there is a great courage, innocence and magic to him that more than a legend is about connection.

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

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

Stories always seem to get better with age.

Legends are all to do with the past and nothing to do with the present.

I love reading all the mythological stories. I was brought up on them.

History has its truth; and so has legend hers.

Myths and legends die hard in America.

It's a good country for myths. Things seem to take root here.

At the heart of every legend there is a grain of truth.

When we stop believing in gods we can start believing in their stories, I retort. There are of course no such things as miracles, but if there were and so tomorrow we woke up to find no more believers on earth, no more devout Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, why then, sure the beauty of the stories would be a thing we could focus on because they wouldn't be dangerous any more, they would become capable of compelling the only belief that leads to truth, that is, the willing, disbelieving of the reader in a well-told tale.

And all who told it added something new, and all who heard it, made enlargements too.

Oral storytelling goes back so long ago, and those stories that were told orally were always layered and changed with time.

I don't really believe in stories, only in the people who tell them.

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.

Our literary culture is marinated in deep traditions of the fantastic and the supernatural, and we export those rich qualities in films and books on a spectacular industrial scale.

As a child, I was fortunate enough to be close to family members who were - and still are - great storytellers. I was a gullible country boy from Rocky Mount, Virginia, and I believed every folktale they told me, no matter how fantastic.

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

Throughout history, story telling was at the very beginning of life.

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

It's no secret that I've always had an interest in mythology. Whether it's Arthurian or ancient Greek or even Marvel universe. I've always connected with it on some level.

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 think when writers play with dragons, we are simply doing what fantasy writers have always done.

My first memory of the public library is of lugging home a volume of Norse myths as heavy as a thunder-god's hammer.