Gunter Grass Quotes

I often visit Maria Tatar's 'The Grimm Reader' for a cold dose of courage. Her translations come from the Brothers Grimm, whose now-famous collection of 'Kinder- und Hausmarchen' ('Children's and Household Tales') was first published in 1812. The book was not intended for young readers.

As a child in Sydney, my German Mum and my Austrian Dad would spontaneously tell me stories about what they saw and what they did as children. It was like a piece of Europe coming into our house... Those stories led me to my writing.

My parents moved from ranch to ranch, valley to valley, town to town, but our roots in Fowler never really faded. For me, it's a place of history, stories and songs, not just facts and figures.

As a child, my mother told me lots of fairy stories, many her own invention. She, too, tended to reverse the norm.

I was raised on the brothers Grimm, but my favorite fairy tales in the world are Oscar Wilde's - 'The Nightingale and the Rose,' 'The Selfish Giant.' The latter is probably my all-time favorite.

Thanks to nanny, I've got a deep understanding of Russian tales.

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

My father leaving the family shaped who I was and how I looked at the world. By the same token, my father telling me fairy tales that he had made up shaped me profoundly, too.

I wanted to be a part of the Disney history.

When I told my mom I was going to audition for 'The Hobbit,' she said, 'Well, you've always loved Tolkien.' And she was right.

You know, I'm trying to sometimes sit down and write some stories about my childhood and maybe one when I'm an old lady put them out like a book.

I love stories. I loved stories when I was a kid. My mom read stories to me all the time.

I think everyone is introduced to the Peter Pan story when they're very young. Everyone has read the book and watched the Disney film and all that.

Once upon a time, I was a little girl sick in the hospital, and my mother gave me a copy of 'Grimm's Fairy Tales' to comfort me.

I grew up with the 'Star Wars' movies since before I have many memories. We had them on VHS back in the day, so they were part of the fabric of growing up in my family.

My father was a restaurant man, laundry man in his lifetime. And I've often wondered how and why did I become an actor? Where did I get the so-called talent to express myself? And I look back, and I see that my mother was very animated. I can remember that she used to, what she called 'bei zhu.'

The only thing I have to go by is what my mother and father told me, how I was brought up.

I grew up in Cyprus and Egypt, these fantastic places I remember fondly.

I developed my taste for coffee at five, staying with my grandmother in Connecticut.

Those of us who can remember our childhoods will recall how ardently we relished the moment of the bedtime story, when our mother or father would sit down beside us in the semi-dark and read from a book of fairy tales.

Our house was awash in books, and my mother doled out her favorites like they were special treats - which they were.

Though the Grimms kept about 100 of the tales from the first edition, they changed them a good deal.

I'm a California Angels fan because that's the first game my dad took me to see, and they stuck with me.

I've always written. There's a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother's papers were destroyed. I'd written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.

I have a daughter, and fairies meant a lot to her growing up.