Arthur Miller Quotes

Shakespeare does a great job of taking 5,000-year-old stories and turning them into modern pieces that are true to the original essence but are completely remade.

To tell the truth, fairytales have never gone out of style. They have been told and retold for thousands of years, finding new shapes and structures with each new generation of tellers.

We used the Western style to express our own themes and stories. But don't forget that our heritage includes The Thousand and One Nights.

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

By recycling pre-existing material, Shakespeare seemed to endorse a view common in his time, which has become even more entrenched in the 400 years since: that all the truly essential stories are already in the bag.

Recasting fairy tales has become a publishing sub-genre in itself, and has been done both well and to the point of entropy. More interesting are those works where the structures of fairytales are abandoned but the world of 'fairy' is imported as a delicate spice.

You want to make money, remake 'Cinderella.' You want to move people, remake the Hippolytus and Phaedra myth.

Sometimes people get fairly obscure just for the creative license of it, and that can backfire. Iconic stories are iconic for a reason, and there are so many incredible, iconic history stories that have not been told that we don't need to go too deep in the well yet.

The one thing that I always try and take with me, if there's, like, a remake, or you're doing something again, is that every generation has a new story to tell.

One cannot make up stories; one can only retell in new ways the stories one has already heard.

Stories are made up by people who make them up. If they work, they get retold. There's the magic of it.

The two basic stories of all times are Cinderella and Jack the Giant Killer-the charm of women and the courage of men.

There's a lot of thievery involved in writing. You're breaking into other people's spaces and other people's stories.

People have a very proprietary relationship with Superman. It's important to respect the iconography and the canon, but at the same time, you have to tell a story.

People populate the darkness; with ghosts, with gods, with electrons, with tales.

It's important not to base your ambition on anybody else's history, but to figure out how best to use your own particular personality and understanding of yourself to help tell other people's stories.

The greatest art in the world is the art of storytelling.

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

It's always a challenge bringing a great story classic to the screen. Giving visual form to the characters and places that have only existed in the imagination. But it's the kind of challenge we enjoy.

There are no happy endings... There are no endings, happy or otherwise. We all have our own stories which are just part of the one Story that binds both this world and Faerie. Sometimes we step into each others stories - perhaps just for a few minutes, perhaps for years - and then we step out of them again. But all the while, the Story just goes on.

Like stories, people have individual lives, and are all caught up in this murky thing. All of them have the best intentions. In that sense, you could just as easily tell the same story from another character's perspective. Maybe that's a good idea for a TV series.

At the end of the day, storytelling is actually very simple in its origin as long as there are people who want to tell stories and there are people who want to hear them.

I have always been interested in mythology and history. The more I read, the more I realized that there have always been people at the edges of history that we know very little about. I wanted to use them in a story and bring them back into the public's consciousness. Similarly with mythology: everyone knows some of the Greek or Roman legends, and maybe some of the Egyptian or Norse stories too, but what about the other great mythologies: the Celtic, Chinese, Native American?

This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we're born into stories. I say we're also born from stories.

So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence.