Diana Wynne Jones Quotes

People love a good story, even if it's a story that has very little truth to it.

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

Storytelling isn't an Escher staircase.

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.

You need more people to perpetuate a myth because if the people stop the myth is known to all.

I like that 'once upon a time' quality, where the telling of a tale has an elevated sense of story. There's a whimsical quality to it. Sometimes in fairy tales more things seem possible, even though often they're real world based.

Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.

I don't believe in storks. I know they don't deliver babies; they deliver pickles.

People still love a good story, and I don't think that will change.

Jack’s life had more to do with myth, legend, saga, and story than with political theory or political science.

I loved the idea of a book of fairytales meant especially for peculiar children, and I love even more the idea of making that fictional book real.

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

Humanity's always been weird at heart. Look at how societies form, rituals, practices, even rock n' roll. Humanity really is dark and twisted.

Ever since human beings learned to talk to each other, we've been fascinated with storytelling of every kind. Blessed (or cursed) with insatiable curiosity, we have to know what happens next.

The most powerful words in English are, 'Tell me a story.'

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.

A woman and a mouse, they carry a tale wherever they go.

I love stories, I love myths, I love fairytales, I love Kafka.

With a tale, forsooth, he cometh unto you; with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner.

What I like about fairy tales is the language and the matter-of-fact way of introducing magic, where it's accepted that a fox could talk or a gate could just appear in a wall. I think fairy tales are so psychological.

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

So, then. You want a story and I will tell you one.

I think storytelling is storytelling. It doesn't matter what format it's shot on.

Humans like stories. Humans need stories. Stories are good. Stories work. Story clarifies and captures the essence of the human spirit. Story, in all its forms—of life, of love, of knowledge—has traced the upward surge of mankind. And story, you mark my words, will be with the last human to draw breath.

At the centre of every fairy tale lay a truth that gave the story its power