Archetypal Characters Quotes

Well, I think they're all basically the same story. Every culture in the world has them. When you strip it down and analyze it, it's the young man or girl who goes through a trial or ordeal and hits a very low ebb but manages to get guidance from a Merlin type figure.

Mythologies are violent things, and to be true to them, you have to go to primal territory.

I say that a myth is a story which has particular energy, mythic resonance. I always say that a myth is a tear in the fabric of reality through which all of this spiritual energy pours.

Fairytales work on two levels. On a conscious level, they are stories of true love and triumph and overcoming difficult odds and so are pleasurable to read. But they work on a deeper and symbolic level in that they play out our universal psychological dramas and hidden desires and fears.

You can't tell a Batman story without the Joker, and you can't tell a Joker story without Batman. They're just the symbols of the best and worst of humanity.

I have a problem with the term 'leading man.' It's so limiting; it involves not upsetting anyone. Obviously, we have anti-heroes now, but if we're talking about the two tropes - character actor and leading man - I would so rather be a character actor. That's why I have a career.

The story being told in Star Wars is a classic one. Every few hundred years, the story is retold because we have a tendency to do the same things over and over again.

As a reader, coming to my reading as a writer immersed in fairytales, I can't help but notice in so many stories, plays, poems that I read, the sort of breadcrumbs of fairytale techniques, so I'm very excited when I notice that.

American movies are often very good at mining those great underlying myths that make films robustly travel across class, age, gender, culture.

The way I sometimes approach my work, when I look at a script for the first time, is to identify what the archetypes are and what the writing is trying to do in that context.

I don't believe any of you have ever read Paradise Lost, and you don't want to. That's something that you just want to take on trust. It's a classic ... something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

I've tried to show in my most recent book, the 'Irresistible Fairytale', that in order to talk about any genre, particularly what we call simple genre - a myth, a legend, an anecdote, a tall tale, and so on - we really have to understand something about the origin of stories all together.

Fairy tales and folk tales are part of the DNA of all stories and great fun to write.

Myths are wonderful tools that we've had, oh, for eons now that help us navigate the situations we find ourselves in.

Thrillers rely on certain archetypes and our familiarity with them is quietly driving all of the tension. So it becomes an interesting challenge from the score perspective, to enhance that tension without being noticed, just like those archetypes.

But all fairytales have rules, and perhaps it’s their rules that actually distinguish one fairytale from the other. These rules never need to be understood. They only need to be followed. If not, what they promise won’t come true.

I've never read Joseph Campbell, and I don't know all that much about story archetypes.

I think there's a great difference in consciousness in that same way in that when we're young we read books for the story, for the excitement of the story - and there comes a time when you realise that all stories are more or less the same story.

I must admit to being greatly influenced by Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces.

I get a lot of inspiration from research in mythology and folklore. I find that, you know, stories people told each other thousands of years ago are still relevant now.

Most religious stories and mythologies have some sort of similar root, some sort of global archetypes.

Folk tales and myths, they've lasted for a reason. We tell them over and over because we keep finding truths in them, and we keep finding life in them.

The human comedy is always tragic, but since its ingredients are always the same - dupe, fox, straight, like burlesque skits - the repetition through the ages is comedy.

It's good sometimes to have a character that starts as one thing and ends as another, but James Bond, Hercules, these are pretty enduring stories.

Folktales are real.