William Bennett Quotes

When I was your age — about, ooh, a thousand years ago — I loved a good bedtime story. The Three Little Sontarans. The Emperor Dalek's New Clothes. Snow White and the Seven Keys to Doomsday, eh? All the classics.

I'm with the Grimms on this: stories for young and old. You can't characterize them any better than that.

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

The bearers of fables are very welcome.

Once upon a time . . .” “In the beginning was . . .” That’s the way it always starts off. Every story, gospel, history, chronicle, myth, legend, folktale, or old wives’ tale blues riff begins with “Woke up this mornin’. . . .

I'm an old storyteller. I tell the story. It's about the story.

Once upon a time fairy tales were told to audiences of young and old alike. It is only in the last century that such tales were deemed fit only for small children, stripped of much of their original complexity, sensuality, and power to frighten and delight.

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

They (fables) teach us that human beings learn and absorb ideas and concepts through narrative, through stories, not through lessons or theoretical speeches.

I mentioned before, these [classic Disney films] are classic mythological tales, a hero's journey, and have been told for thousands of years. Disney has updated them, and made them accessible for us.

I come from a long line of serial embellishers. Sometimes a good story's got a ghost in it; sometimes a panther chases my Uncle Bill and Fred Price home from a coon hunt.

I don't know that movies are important. But I know that stories are important. Movies may disappear. They've only been around, for God's sake, for the last hundred years... I think that it's the need to tell stories, and that people need to be told stories. It's the old sitting around the fire, you know.

Myth is, after all, the neverending story.

It wasn't until I was an adult reader that I began to fathom the influence of fairy tales on writers I was in love with over the years, from Louisa May Alcott to Bernard Malamud to John Cheever to Anne Frank to Joy Williams.

A good story, a story resonant and remarkable, can be remade endlessly to tell new sides of itself for new generations of readers.

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.

All the ancient classic fairy tales have always been scary and dark.

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

Soils and national characters differ, but fairy tales are the same in plot and incidents, if not in treatment.

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

Fairy-tales are nice.

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.

Fairy tales, because they have a very clear structure, are easier to interfere with. Also they have this really weird logic: the kind of logic that you only really experience when you're not feeling very well, or as a child.

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.

I was brought up, as a lot of kids are, on 'Aesop's Fables,' 'Brothers Grimm,' 'La Fontaine,' all those sorts of things. Hans Christian Andersen is a hero of mine.