Mythological Storytelling Quotes

If I have something I want to say that is too difficult for adults to swallow, then I write it in a book for children. Children still haven't closed themselves off with fear of the unknown, fear of revolution, or the scramble for security. They are still familiar with the inborn vocabulary of myth

Symbols are specific acts or figures, while myths develop and elaborate these symbols into a story which contains characters and several episodes. The myth is thus more inclusive. But both symbol and myth have the same function psychologically; they are man's way of expressing the quintessence of his experience - his way of seeing his life, his self-image and his relations to the world of his fellow men and of nature - in a total figure which at the same moment carries the vital meaning of this experience.

I wanted to make a kids' film that would strengthen contemporary mythology.

In this tradition a story is 'holy,' and it is used as medicine," she told Radiance magazine. "The story is not told to lift you up, to make you feel better, or to entertain you, although all those things can be true. The story is meant to take the spirit into a descent to find something that is lost or missing and to bring it back to consciousness again.

If you want to put your rock 'n' roll into mythology, [A Period of Transition] is from the Daddy Cool school.

The poet is he who can write some pure mythology today without the aid of posterity.

He comes into the world God knows how, walks on the water, gets out of his grave and goes up off the Hill of Howth. What drivel is this?

Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are the artists of one kind or another.

If you're not making epic, archetypal films on some level, I think you're wasting a great potential of cinema.

I'm a fan of the 'Underworld' films, but I don't necessarily consider them horror.

Sometimes we get frustrated ourselves and decide it's time to download a big chunk of mythology. And then the audience says, 'I find this confusing and alienating and too weird.' So then we pull back, and they say, 'You're not giving us enough'.

To me, the difference between mythology and real history is that the real history has to tell a kind of believable story of how things happened. The physics has to work.

Mythology can be used, and has been used, even to re-state, you know, the very urgent problems of the world.

It was really John's [Musker] idea to begin with to tell a story set in the world of the South Pacific, Polynesia. He started, he just loved the world and he started reading a lot of mythology, which most people are not that familiar with.

Initially it was a fascination for Tolkienesque Fantasy, and role-playing games, with time I realized that it was the mythological elements that fascinated me the most, so I moved more and more in that direction.

I look at all of world mythology and folklore as my toy to play with. There are just so many characters and creatures there I want to put on paper. It's a really exciting thing for me to take material that I really love and put a new coat of paint on it and present it to this audience. And I don't have to make up any of the characters. I can just pull a book of mythology off the shelf and say, "I'll use this guy." I also hate making up names for fantasy characters. I'll just flip through these books and say, "Wow, this is way crazier than anything I could make up".