David Grann Quotes

I guess if I had to pick one interest that is unique, it would be giant squids - I'm disturbingly fascinated by them and even wrote a story about the hunt for them.

The giant squid has the biggest eyes of any animal on the planet. It's a visual predator.

I find Godzilla exciting because he/she/it comes from the sea. It's entirely plausible that it could be real. Yes it is! It doesn't take a huge stretch in the imagination to imagine that something may be living at the deepest depths of one of our oceans.

The Loch Ness monster doesn't exist either. Loch Ness is just not big enough to hide a thirty foot amphibian or reptile for hundreds of years.

There was a time when fire and story would fall asleep in unison. It was dream time.

I have always loved octopuses. No sci-fi alien is so startlingly strange.

Every crag and gnarled tree and lonely valley has its own strange and graceful legend attached to it.

King Pellinore that time followed the questing beast.

I believe the Abominable Snowman may be real. I think there may be something in that.

'Legend of the Seeker' - it has new and interesting creatures and magic, but it's the stories.

I just love mermaids. I was a mermaid in my past life. I just feel it when I go in the sea. I just feel a connection there between me, and the water, and the fish - they speak to me - and the shells - they ring out to me.

For a time, I believed not in God nor Santa Claus, but in mermaids. They seemed as logical and possible to me as the brittle twig of a seahorse in the zoo aquarium or the skates lugged up on the lines of cursing Sunday fishermen - skates the shape of old pillowslips with the full, coy lips of women.

There's a lot of animals in the open ocean - most of them that make light. And we have a pretty good idea, for most of them, why. They use it for finding food, for attracting mates, for defending against predators. But when you get down to the bottom of the ocean, that's where things get really strange.

One of the things that's frustrated me as a deep-sea explorer is how many animals there probably are in the ocean that we know nothing about because of the way we explore the ocean.

Squid experts have been debating for some time about whether the giant squid is a passive predator that just floats around in the water and waits to bump into something. I was never one to imagine it to be passive.

Giant squid aren't rare. Based on the number of beaks that have been found in the stomachs of sperm whales, it's thought that there are actually millions of them in the ocean, and yet, we haven't seen them.

I've always loved mermaids!

I need to be believe that dragons are real. I want them be a real thing.

I want to ride a unicorn.

I have a bit of a love affair with fairy tales and some of the ideas of Irish mythology, like Oscar Wilde and W.B. Yeats, who captured a lot of that very beautifully.

From a tale one expects a bit of wildness, of exaggeration and dramatic effect. The tale has no inherent concern with decorum, balance or harmony. ... A tale may not display a great deal of structural, psychological, or narrative sophistication, though it might possess all three, but it seldom takes its eye off its primary goal, the creation of a particular emotional state in its reader. Depending on the tale, that state could be wonder, amazement, shock, terror, anger, anxiety, melancholia, or the momentary frisson of horror.

Besides, if there were no dragons of flesh and blood and fire, whence would come the idea for these stone carvings?

Strangely enough, there's this mythology sprouting out that I cannot stop.

There's a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle.

Fairy tales since the beginning of recorded time, and perhaps earlier, have been “a means to conquer the terrors of mankind through metaphor.