Fairy Quotes

Fairy tales opened up a door into my imagination – they don’t conform to the reality that’s around you as a child. I started reading when I was three and read everything, but I wanted to be an actress.

Yes, hell exists. It is not a fairy tale. One indeed burns there. This hell is not at the end of life. It is here. At the beginning. Hell is what the infant must experience before he gets to us.

As a kid, I would keep telling my younger sister that I was a fairy who had come here to spend time with them. And I actually got to play one!

You can get this feeling of the English or Scottish or Irish or Welsh fairy, but it is by nature very elusive. It would be possible to pin down a German fairy, but the English one just vanishes, becomes the shadow under the trees.

Many people think fairy tales and retellings of fairy tales are only for children, but I’m not the only writer to take an old tale and retell it for a sophisticated adult audience.

I couldn’t stand it. It was what I thought I always wanted. I was there every day in the trenches, and I hated everything about that job. But what I loved – and what I got from ‘The Tooth Fairy’ – was to see how studio movies were released.

Getting to work at Lick was like being touched by the wand of your fairy godmother.

As I read more and more fairy tales as an adult, I found massive collusion between their ‘subjects‘ and those in my fiction: childhood, nature, sexuality, transformation. I realized that it wasn’t by accident that I was drawn to their narrative structure and motifs.

I was a youngish man entering fatherhood when we wrote ‘Woods,’ a patchwork of classic fairy tales with an original tale sewn in. I had dedicated my libretto to my baby daughter.

Tink is the voice of the youth. I’m not one of those artists who talks about unrealistic things or fairy tales. I’m not talking about expensive things and cars. I’m actually talking about what’s going on in my life and every teenager‘s life, too.

I never quite understood why Disney hadn’t made a sincere fairy tale since ‘Beauty and the Beast.’

Culturally even, you have shows like ‘Friends’ or ‘Sex in the City’ that are imbibed along with like fairy stories, which are all about The One. Then we feel like we’re looking for it, and if relationships end, what we’ve experienced isn’t valid.

As a child, I loved fairy tales because the story, the what-comes-next, is paramount. As an adult, I’m fascinated by their logic and illogic.

I also like the whole idea of fairy tales and folk tales being a woman‘s domain, considered a lesser domain at the time they were told.

Every movie, I complicate. I make the hard choices. I remember when I was pitching ‘Pan’s Labyrinth:’ An anti-fascist fairy tale set in Civil War Spain, where the girl dies at the end. It’s not easy.

I loved reading Grimm’s fairy tales and Hans Christian Andersen, and I loved to dream about other worlds and other lives. Maybe that has something to do with having an incomplete family, being an only child. All I know is I loved to pretend, and all that was in tandem with my wanting to be an actress.

Soils and national characters differ, but fairy tales are the same in plot and incidents, if not in treatment.

People don’t like the true and simple; they like fairy tales and humbug.

I don’t know what to think about magic and fairy tales.

God, people say ‘Black Mirror‘ was horrible – it’s nothing compared to the stuff that happens in ‘Grimms’ Fairy Tales.’ It’s mind-bending.

I always wanted to be on ‘Sesame Street,’ that kind of a thing, puppets and fun and original songs and fairy tales.

One of the best things about folklore and fairy tales is that the best fantasy is what you find right around the corner, in this world. That’s where the old stuff came from.

Dragons and bridges are very much something out of fairy tales and fantasy.

Writing is writing to me. I’m incapable of saying no to any writing job, so I’ve done everything – historical fiction, myths, fairy tales, anything that anybody expresses any interest in me writing, I’ll write. It’s the same reason I used to read as a child: I like going somewhere else and being someone else.

If you can make it as a children’s party fairy, you can make it anywhere.

Fairy tales are stories of triumph and transformation and true love, all things I fervently believe in.

Seeing my parents makes me realise that life is not a fairy tale.

I realized that there is no fairy tale.

My father leaving the family shaped who I was and how I looked at the world. By the same token, my father telling me fairy tales that he had made up shaped me profoundly, too.

You know when you have a party as a kid, and your mom hires a fairy, princess, or superhero to come host the party? I was Fairy Lavender. I loved it. It was good training for theater.

I’m a child of the Disney Renaissance, so the new classics are near and dear. I suppose this is a legend more than a fairy tale, but ‘Mulan’ is easily my favorite. Not only is it a fun, action-packed, beautiful movie, but it’s so important for young girls to have.

I’ve learned that I want what I deny. I want someone who is crazy about me, who treats me like a princess. I want the picture-perfect fairy tale stuff.

As a little girl living in the English countryside, I used to go running around in the forests, creating my own fairy tale.

A romantic novel is an adult fairy story, repeating the recurring symbols and images which can explain life to a woman and satisfy a powerful need within her. The need to love and be loved is vital to all human beings, but especially to women.

I was raised on the brothers Grimm, but my favorite fairy tales in the world are Oscar Wilde’s – ‘The Nightingale and the Rose,’ ‘The Selfish Giant.’ The latter is probably my all-time favorite.

Fairy tales are really violent, the original ones.

In the fairy tale the painting represents the here and now. The book is actually divided into five sections, through which the key character, the muse, leads us.

I love fairy tales because I think that behind fairy tales, there is always a meaning.

The legacy of the fairy story in my brain is that everything will work out. In fiction it would be very hard for me, as a writer, to give a bad ending to a good character, or give a good ending to a bad character. That’s probably not a very postmodern thing to say.

I have very happy memories of fairy tales. My mother used to take me to the library in Toronto to check out the fairy tales. And she was an actress, so she used to act out for me the different characters in all these fairy tales.

Kids delight in ‘magical thinking‘, whether in the form of the Tooth Fairy or the saints: whether you see these as comforting lies or eternal verities, they are part of how we help kids make sense of the world.