Top 225 Fairy Quotes

Things aren’t always the fairy tale that you thought they were.

Why the fairy tale of Willie Mays making a brilliant World Series catch, and then dashing off to play stickball in the street with his teenage pals. That’s baseball. So is the husky voice of a doomed Lou Gehrig saying, ‘I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth.’

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

And now, I’m a best selling author, a different sort of fairy tale that I still sometimes wonder when I’ll wake up from.

If you look at children‘s stories in fairy tales, they’re pretty brutal.

You should treat a muse like a fairy.

But I don’t know if people are meant to be together. You have to have a lot in common, choose well and be really fortunate. It’s not like you’re sprinkled with fairy dust. You have to believe that love will be there when you need it.

Even as a kid, I read ‘Jung – Reflections and Individuation In Fairy Tales’; all the inner circle of Jung was a real huge thing for me.

Everytime a child says ‘I don’t believe in fairies‘ there is a a little fairy somewhere that falls down dead.

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 think it would be hard to find an American who, during their first week at Cambridge didn’t genuinely feel like it was fairy tale.

We didn’t have any books at home. Not even children’s books or fairy tales. The only ‘fantastic‘ stories came from religion class. And I took them all very literally, that God sees everything, and so I felt I was always being watched. Or that dead people were in Heaven right over our village.

The spark for ‘In Praise of Slowness‘ came when I began reading to my children. Every parent knows that kids like their bedtime stories read at a gentle, meandering pace. But I used to be too fast to slow down with the Brothers Grimm. I would zoom through the classic fairy tales, skipping lines, paragraphs, whole pages.

When I started acting, I didn’t think of it as a career. I always thought Hollywood was this magical world where a fairy came down and said, ‘Come live with the Munchkins; you are now one of us.’ I didn’t understand the concept of it as a career. I thought I would save up enough money to go to college.

I feel like Nashville has watched me grow up in front of them, which is cool, but it kind of sucks at the same time because you get pigeonholed, like, ‘Oh, she‘s the girl with the long hair that wears fairy dresses.’ That was me at one point because I was new and I was young. But we all grow up.

I’ll be left writing picture books and fairy tales.

Hollywood always represents this big dream and fairy tale in people’s minds, but to me, it’s just hard work. Of course, we play fairy tale on the red carpet. It’s all Cinderella. But when the clock strikes midnight, I turn into a gray mouse and I go home, and I take my dress off and it’s over. That’s Hollywood.

For me, any fiction of nobles and swords necessarily has to be a story of corruption, injustice and savagely violent conflict – because any other treatment is going to have all the heft and realistic honesty of a bedtime fairy tale for five year olds.

Each time I’m starting to work on a film, even if I love to settle the plot in the real world, I start to think about the plot as a fairy tale, or a dream, or a nightmare… As if it was the best way to tell the truth about characters or narration, instead of realism.

When I was a kid, Santa, the Tooth Fairy, my stuffed animals – they were real. There is the tremendous suspension of disbelief that you have as a child. It’s harder as an adult.

To portray an iconic character has been brilliant in itself, and to be able to do that on a show like ‘Once Upon a Time’ enhances that because the show puts a spin on characters and makes them very different and puts core values that are very different that aren’t in the original fairy tales a lot of people relate to.

‘Snow White‘ is an old fairy tale, so obviously the idea of vanity and obsession with youth is long-standing. With today‘s science, people have become crazy with trying to move their face around. It’s bizarre.

I believe in elves and giants. I believe that fairy tales are nothing more than news reports of what once happened.

The naturalist worldview is a good way to feel grounded and feel part of something that isn’t based on fairy tales. It’s based on observable facts in the human and in the biological history of the planet. I think that can be a source for comfort.

If I wasn’t a singer, I would be a fairy princess.

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

I grew up with Bible stories, which are like fairy tales, because my father was a minister. We heard verses and prayers every day. I liked the gorier Bible stories. I did have a book of Chinese fairy tales. All the people except the elders looked like Italians. But we were not a family that had fiction books.

All of my work is influenced by fairy tales, and I hope my work shows Hans Christian Anderson‘s influence.

The idea that somebody else is going to swoop down and play the fairy godmother role is pretty unlikely, so why not take care of yourself?

There are benefits to adopting a toddler. They can tell you what’s wrong. And – everything we did with our daughter was a first. Her first tooth fairy. Santa.

When I was little, I had to write down what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I wrote, ‘I want to be an actress-singer-dancer because you can be a rich fairy princess and tell someone off.’

I love fairy tales.

Well the wedding in the words of the Archbishop of Canterbury was a fairy tale and there was a huge public impress, investment of goodwill, affection and indeed money in this Institution. It was a huge success at the time.

The most fascinating thing for me is that ‘Peter Pan’ is a fairy tale, but now, this Filipino kid is a part of the folklore. Can you imagine telling the story of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ or ‘Cinderella,’ and all of a sudden there’s a Filipino kid in there after all these years?

I wish somebody had given me the news that ideas don’t just fall on your head like fairy dust. You have to treat that like a job. You have to spend hours each day, where you’re just like, ‘This is the part of the day when I’m looking for an idea.’

When I was 11, I had an Ugly Sister birthday party. All my idea. Most girls want to be a fairy or a princess, but there I am with beauty spots and fur and fluorescent pink kiss-curls.

Fairy tales, before they were sanitized, were very dark, and kids love that. ‘Coraline’ by Neil Gaiman feels like Beckett for kids. I think there’s plenty of room for that. And I think there’s a danger of being too patronizing to children, having things too sanitized.

When I was born, I was born very prematurely so I was very tiny and small. And so, my mom just nicknamed me Pixie, like a little fairy.

Every time a child says I don’t believe in fairies there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead.

I am not sure how much good is done by moralising about fairy tales. This can be unsubtle – telling children that virtue will be rewarded, when in fact it is mostly simply the fact of being the central character that ensures a favourable outcome. Fairy tales are not, on the whole, parables.

Conservatives used to believe in confronting hard truths, not succumbing to comforting fairy tales. Some still do.

One of the major dangers of being alone in February is the tendency to dwell on past relationships. Whether you’re daydreaming about that ‘one that got away,’ or you’re recalling the fairy tale date you went on last Valentine’s Day, romanticizing the past isn’t helpful – nor accurate.

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.

To me, a fairy tale seems to have become reality.

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.

My childhood ambition was to become a Tooth Fairy. And I do talk about that in my book ‘Is You Okay.’ My mama always told me to say I wanted to be a corporate lawyer, and today I am much closer to being a Tooth Fairy than I ever was a Corporate Lawyer… so hah hah hah hah.

I always wanted the fairy tale, but now I want someone who is a great partner.

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

Fairy tales, because they have a very clear structure, are easier to interfere with. Also they have this really weird logic: the kind of logic that you only really experience when you’re not feeling very well, or as a child.

I played a bee! It was a Polish fairy tale we performed at school when I was seven or eight. I had wings fixed to me.

I have never dreamed of being a princess. I have not longed for Prince Charming. I have and do long for something resembling a happily ever after. I am supposed to be above such flights of fantasy, but I am not. I am enamored of fairy tales.

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 began to believe the fairy tales: You know, how we’re all out there looking for our magical missing half.

Those of us who can remember our childhoods will recall how ardently we relished the moment of the bedtime story, when our mother or father would sit down beside us in the semi-dark and read from a book of fairy tales.

I was a great reader of fairy tales. I tried to read the entire fairy tale section of the library.

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

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.

When you hear the words ‘magic’ and ‘story’, they will probably evoke thoughts of your favourite fairy tales from childhood. Storybook pages abound with all manner of magic: fantastical fairies, wish-granting genies, or even a certain boy wizard.

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.

I’m a great believer in fairy tales. I think it is important to have something you can lose yourself in.

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.

All I know is that I’ve ruled out wearing fairy wings. When I was nine I wanted to get married in fairy wings, and now I realize that’s not cool anymore.

I was very excited to do ‘The Witches.’ It was with one of my favorite directors, Nick Roeg, and I loved his work from ‘Don’t Look Now’ and ‘Eureka.’ So I was very excited to work with him. The story was a very subversive fairy tale by Roald Dahl, and a fantastic part.

Maybe my fairy tale has a different ending than I dreamed it would. But that’s OK.

My life has been nothing short of a fairy tale.

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.

A scientist in his laboratory is not a mere technician: he is also a child confronting natural phenomena that impress him as though they were fairy tales.

It is my childhood dream to have a Christian-style wedding, just like the fairy tales.

Obsessed by a fairy tale, we spend our lives searching for a magic door and a lost kingdom of peace.

I think ‘Wreck-It Ralph‘ can stand proudly in the pantheon of the great Disney animated films. It’s a fairy tale disguised as something more contemporary. With its balance of heart and comedy, it is still very much rooted in the Disney legacy.

My family is my little village. I really do feel like my fairy tale came true.

I’ve had a fairy tale life. I had a perfect family, a beautiful childhood, an incredible upbringing. I lived a lot of life but a lot of good life.

I think that true love, fairy tales, the positive messages of positive stories – I don’t think those ever die. Sometimes we like to hide them in sarcasm or irony, but they are still there, and they still move us.

I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the Second World War.

The universe has a much greater imagination than we do, which is why the real story of the universe is far more interesting than any of the fairy tales we have invented to describe it.

Artless fairy stories enchant us in our first years and retain their hold on us until our last.

My first marriage was very traditional, in the church, and then we left the church and went to the reception hall. So this time, I’d like to go fairy tale all the way.

I think it’s really hard to draw a hard-and-fast line and say ‘Grimm’s Fairy Tales’ doesn’t count as science fiction or fantasy. Or at what point do we say mythology is not fantasy, so reading mythology when you’re young does not count as an exposure to fantasy?

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

As long as you keep one foot in the real world while the other foot’s in a fairy tale, that fairy tale is going to seem kind of attainable.

I loved fairy tales when I was a kid. Grimm. The grimmer the better. I loved gruesome gothic tales and, in that respect, I liked Bible stories, because to me they were very gothic.

I had a fairy shrine in my room, and I went to fairy LARPing camp, and I played Dungeons and Dragons in the woods.

When ‘Johnny Bravo‘ was going to end, I thought, ‘I really need to sell something. I need a job.’ So, I sat down and just sketched this little boy with a fairy godmother. I was going to do a boy version of ‘Cinderella.’

The world of religion isn’t a logical world; that’s why children like it. It’s a world of worked-out fantasies, very similar to children’s stories or fairy tales.

Fairy tales read before bed tend to make me dream. They’re all quite violent stories, as are my dreams.

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.

Brits and Americans have hundreds of different phrases for the same thing. Luckily, it’s usually a source of amusement rather than frustration. A flashlight by any other name is still a torch. My personal favourite is ‘fairy lights,’ which we boringly refer to as ‘Christmas lights.’

I absolutely believed when I was young because the Tooth Fairy was always good to me. The Tooth Fairy generally left me a dollar or two dollars and, as a kid, that was a lot of money.

We were wild-eyed hippies from the late ’60s. We still had the exuberance of the mind-expanding ’60s – that Tolkienesque, Zeppelin, androgynous, wood nymph, forest fairy kind of innocence. It sounds stupid now, but we felt we were changing the world with music.

I always felt and still feel that fairy tales have an emotional truth that is so deep that there are few things that really rival them.

All the ancient classic fairy tales have always been scary and dark.

Do we believe that there is equal economic opportunity out there in the real world, right now, for each and every one of these groups? If we believed in the tooth fairy, if we believed in the Easter Bunny, we might well believe that.

Many of us live in dysfunctional families, and so even if it’s in a fairy tale, or perhaps because it’s in a fairy tale, we have a chance to look at that side of our reflected lives differently.

‘Star Wars‘ is more fairy tale than true science fiction.

A project like ‘Rizzoli & Isles’ is something you can’t pursue. It’s something that comes to you… I like to call it ‘fairy dust.’ And it happened without my having to do anything.

I was a Nancy Drew girl. Also Grimms’ fairy tales.

I was born an only child in Vienna, Austria. My father found hours to sit by me by the library fire and tell fairy stories.

As a child, my mother told me lots of fairy stories, many her own invention. She, too, tended to reverse the norm.

If you are going to believe in the fairy tale of ‘Mr. Right,’ then you need to keep everything in perspective. Know the things that make you happy. Know the things that enable and/or hinder your growth.

I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity.

I taught a class about the Tony Awards at a summer theater camp the year after I graduated from high school. So, the first time I was nominated for ‘Spring Awakening,’ it felt like a surreal dream: it was every childhood dream I had come true. It felt like a fairy tale.

Nature is a book, a letter, a fairy tale (in the philosophical sense) or whatever you want to call it.

Fairy tales were important to me. Aren’t they for any kid? My sister says I spent a good five years of my youth convinced I would grow up to be a princess.

Through machinery, man can exert tremendous powers almost as fantastic as if he were the hero of a fairy tale. Through machinery, man can travel with an ever increasing velocity; he can fly through the air and go beneath the surface of the ocean.

I’ve gotten to hang out with Elmo, I’m the Fairy Shoeperson on ‘Sesame Street’. So hopefully our kids will get to see and hear me as much as they’re able.

When I was little, I made up my own fairy tales, and the ghostly echo of ‘Once upon a time’ shapes all the fiction I’ve ever written.

I have a daughter, Hanna, and I never read fairy tales to her. But I did tell her bedtime tales and made up many tales involving ‘Gory the Goblin’ and other creatures that I borrowed from the Grimms’ tales and other tales I knew.

A peace agreement isn’t like a fairy story. You don’t live happily ever after.

Life itself is the most wonderful fairy tale.

The Islamic terror threat is so fierce, unrelenting and barbaric that we tell ourselves fairy tales about how these ruthless acts are anything but what they are: acts of war.

The minute that you bring a unicorn into a story, you know that it’s a fairy tale or a fable, because unicorns don’t exist as animals. They exist as fantasy creatures.

I’d imagine my wedding as a fairy tale… huge, beautiful and white.

Sometimes it’s great when, you know, you’re sitting down to watch a straightforward story, and you know how it’s going to go, and you know how it’s going to end. That’s a fairy tale.

Generally speaking, it has been my ambition to write as a good old nurse will speak when she tells fairy tales.

I don’t know what my formula is. I only know I like my characters to walk in clouds. I like a little bit of the fairy tale. Let others photograph the ugliness of the world. I don’t want to distress people.

I started as a fairy on the ‘Dorothy the Dinosaur Show.’ That was mainly just a national tour that featured Dorothy the Dinosaur.

What I personally gravitate toward tends to be fantasy, medium dark – not too dark – fairy tales and sci fi. Stop-motion takes something on the page that’s really dark and adds a little sweetness to it, a living toys realm.

I grew up in a household without a TV. We lived next door to a library for a while, and at one point, I checked out all the books in the fairy tale section. I remember the librarian‘s quiet smile as I’d bring back one stack and exchange it for another.

Casting directors are like these fairy godmother witches.

I’m fascinated with the stories that we tell. Real histories become fantasies and fairy tales, morality tales and fables. There’s something interesting and funny and perverse about the way fairytale sometimes passes for history, for truth.

I love the Queen. I love the whole fairy tale of the Royal Family; the Crown Jewels; Buckingham Palace; the tourist attraction. But really, is that what we’ve got a monarchy for? It’s just for tourism, and then you survive and live off taxpayers‘ money?

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.

Rather than say he’s an atheist, a friend of mine says, ‘I’m a tooth fairy agnostic,’ meaning he can’t disprove God but thinks God is about as likely as the tooth fairy.

When I was a little kid, I used to spend a lot of time thinking about what I’d wish for if a magic fairy gave me three wishes. First, I wanted to be loved. Then, I wanted to be beautiful. And, finally, I’d wish for a million more wishes.

The ‘Mahabharata’ is a more complex and longer saga than the ‘Ramayana,’ which is like a fairy tale. It’s much lighter and more fun, and at its heart, there’s a cracking love story.

I realized that there is no fairy tale.

Let the little fairy in you fly!

Sometimes, violent details have been eliminated from fairy tales simply because they were deemed too graphic. So one does not, at the end of Disney’s version of ‘Cinderella,’ see the stepsisters’ eyes get pecked and pecked by doves, because Disney wanted to market the story for wholesome family viewing.

By fairy hands their knell is rung; By forms unseen their dirge is sung.

What works about fairy tales is that they endure, and the great thing about fairy tales is that you can explore big, epic things that you can’t really explore in other situations.

There have been a number of us working very, very hard to bring myth and fairy tales into public consciousness, through fantasy literature and other media. I hope we’re succeeding in some small way.

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.

The point is, how do you know the Guarantee Fairy isn’t a crazy glue sniffer.

Why should we strive, with cynic frown, to knock their fairy castles down?

People tend to think of fairy tales as ‘archetypal.’ They are also extremely sensual, something which translates well over the ages.

Usually, the fairy tale ends with the girl marrying the prince. But mine started as soon as the marriage was over.

It’s a job. When I’m writing I’m going to do it five to six days a week and I’m going to work for four to six hours a day. There’s no magic writing fairy. It’s just hard work.

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.

At no point do I ever remember taking religion very seriously or even feeling that the biblical stories were any different from fairy stories. Certainly, none of it made any sense. By comparison, the world in which I lived, though I might not always understand it in all aspects, always made a lot of sense.

Fairy tales cross generational lines, and how you respond to them depends on when in your life you’re seeing them.

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.

Folk tales, fairy tales, religion, the occult – these are the things I’m most passionate about, even more than cinema. And I’m very passionate about cinema.

The entire economy relies on the suspension of disbelief. So does a fairy story or an animated cartoon. This means that no matter how soberly the financial experts dress, no matter how dry their language, the economy they worship can only ever be as plausible as an episode of ‘SpongeBob SquarePants.’

My joking answer to this question is that I leave a bowl of milk out on the back porch every night for the Idea Fairy. In the morning, the milk is gone and there’s a brand-new shiny idea by the bowl.

Oh, gosh, I have always been a huge fan of horror since I was a child. I know this is going to sound really weird, but I think it started with fairy tales.

I always wanted the fairy tale, but now I want someone who is a great partner.

I was the original Cinderella girl, looking for the happy ending in the fairy story. But my fantasy prince never came.

The original fairy tale was about the youngest sister going into a room in the castle and finding all the bodies of the wives that came before her – she is confronted with truth, thinking about how often we think we know people and we really don’t.

I certainly don’t think of my life as a fairy tale. I think of myself as a modern, contemporary woman who has had to deal with all kinds of problems that many women today have to deal with.

You see the fairy tale – four minutes of glory at the Olympics. I thought my life would be cake after that.

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

Whether you plan to labor with an epidural or the Pitocin Fairy pins you down or you end up having an emergency C-section, there are still choices you can make throughout your entire birth experience that allow you to feel some control over what is probably the most dramatic day of your life.

I like to escape; I like to write when I go on a walk – I’m kind of very fairy that way. I get inspired by the wind. Or when I daydream, that’s when I write.

The entire economy relies on the suspension of disbelief. So does a fairy story or an animated cartoon. This means that no matter how soberly the financial experts dress, no matter how dry their language, the economy they worship can only ever be as plausible as an episode of ‘SpongeBob SquarePants.’

I wrote a lot of scripts that were dark and fairy tale-like, but too strange.

What I like about fairy tales is that they highlight the emotions within a story. The situations aren’t real, with falling stars and pirates. But what you do relate to is the emotions that the characters feel.

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.

I am your fairy tale. Your dream. Your wishes and desires, and I am your thirst and your hunger and your food and your drink.

What is the real purpose behind the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus? They seem like greater steps toward faith and imagination, each with a payoff. Like cognitive training exercises.

I had to grow up fast because we know it’s not all fairy tales out there; it’s full of rubbish.

One of the first houses we lived in was like out of a fairy story. We had a stream that ran through our garden, and we played with the ducks – we locked them in my mum‘s office, and they pooed everywhere. It was crazy, picking blackberries and mushrooms, rabbits running through your legs.

I loved fairy tales growing up.

My parents were working performers, so obviously I saw that there wasn’t a lot of fairy tale going on there. It was a precarious world. One that they were deeply committed to and deeply loved, but one that required a lot of hard work.

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

I’m an interpreter of stories. When I perform it’s like sitting down at my piano and telling fairy stories.

Look at Jane Austen. Her characters derive in a reasonably straight line from fairy tales.

Like you see in the fairy tales, that’s how it planned out in my head. Kids, little white picket fence, the American dream.

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.

A lot of children are interested in fairies, especially young girls, and Tinker Bell is the ueber-fairy. She’s the pin-up girl of fairies. She’s the ultimate fairy, but she’s also got a mischievous spirit and she’s very strong-willed. I think a lot of youngsters recognize themselves in Tinker Bell.

Well, Company of Wolves was about that literally, about fairy tales.

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.

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

In kindergarten that used to be my job, to tell them fairytales. I liked Hans Christian Andersen, and the Grimm fairy tales, all the classic fairy tales.

I never read any fairy tales or classics until I was an adult; all we ever had was comics… No television, either. If we wanted entertainment, we hung around the fish shop.

I’m so excited to see ‘Horns‘ because it’s so many different genres in one film. It’s a sci-fi, it’s a love story, it’s a horror movie, it’s a fairy tale.

I never even was in any of my high school plays. I mean, look at me. What role could they give me – the tooth fairy?

When I wrote the eight fairy tales that appear in ‘Horse, Flower, Bird‘ I was working toward a completely new form of artistic expression, trying to create a new kind of tale that also felt vintage: innocent and childlike, but haunted. I tried to write a picture-less picture book.

Well, it’s quite strange because there are three new Wiggles – Simon the red wiggle, Lachlan the purple wiggle and myself. We were already in the company doing different roles. Like, I was the fairy, the ballerina, and that kind of thing originally, and then I played Dorothy the Dinosaur and I was a Wiggles dancer.

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

I feel like I’m walking into the illustrated pages of a fairy tale when I go to the vineyard. It draws you to nature and cleanses your soul, and you just don’t want to leave.

Come away, O human child: To the waters and the wild with a fairy, hand in hand, For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

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.

I think people should read fairy tales, because we’re hungry for a mythology that will speak to our fears.

I like being scared, so I’ve always liked fairy tales because they’re kind of creepy.

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

I grew up with a lot of fairy tales. And they had an essence of darkness to them.

Sometimes you have to censor books. When I read ‘Peter Rabbit,’ I skip the part about Peter’s father ending up in one of Mrs. McGregor’s pies. I also hid the book of ‘Grimm Fairy Tales.’ They’re just too grim for my grandkids. Reality will come soon enough.

The good historian is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies.

You cannot make a social-conscious picture in which you say that the intermediary between the hand and the brain is the heart. I mean, that’s a fairy tale – definitely.

When I was a kid, both my mom and my dad worked night shifts, so we would spend a lot of time at my grandfather‘s house. He taught at UCLA and was just really into history. Before bed, when other kids heard fairy tales, he would tell us about the American founding fathers and the beginning of democracy.

What you hear and what the research shows is that gentlemen negotiate for their first job. Women do not negotiate from their first job and on. And I tell women there is no H.R. fairy godmother. There might be, but you better not count on it.

If you want to tell grown-up fairy tales, you have to look for the dark side.

I’m, like, a tiny musical theater fairy.

I love fairy tale retellings and mash-ups.

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.

My mother’s childhood was complex, disjointed, and disturbing. As children, we would gather round and ask her to tell us again and again The Story of Her Childhood. It was Grimmsian, Andersenesque: a classic fairy tale replete with goodies and baddies.

You have this fairy tale of ‘life on your own.’ It’s so awesome. Until the apartment floods, or something happens, and your go-to people aren’t there.

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.

Happiness is like those palaces in fairy tales whose gates are guarded by dragons: we must fight in order to conquer it.

Fairy tales are really violent, the original ones.

Divorce in a young-adult novel means what being orphaned meant in a fairy tale: vulnerability, danger, unwanted independence.

Fancy the happiness of Pinocchio on finding himself free! Without saying yes or no, he fled from the city and set out on the road that was to take him back to the house of the lovely Fairy.

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.

I never heard the Gospel until I was 18 years old. Jesus Christ… the name was synonymous to me as the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus.

I love monsters, I love creatures, I love beings, I love aliens. That’s more supernatural and more the stuff of fairy tales. Fairy tales are as ancient as we are. I love those stories. I think they’re really interesting because they always have more than simply the fright aspect. There’s something deeply psychological.

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.

I don’t know that I think women have to throw out the fairy tale ending. I just think they have to decide what their fairy tale ending is – and not go with the standard one that everyone‘s told them they’re supposed to have.

Living in a zoo means it wasn’t always sparkly dresses, but I would still dress up. I had this pink sparkly dress and fairy wings, and I’d put those on and then go and dance in the zoo.

I don’t really care what people tell children – when you believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, one more fib won’t hurt. But I am infuriated by the growing notion, posited in some touchy-feely quarters, that all women are, or can be, beautiful.

I made fun of myself before everybody else could, so I always got the comic crowns: Freshman Fink, Sophomore Fairy, Junior Birdman. I got all three of them!

Nothing is ever perfect. You have to make compromises and sacrifices, and it won’t always be as glamorous as the fairy tales may suggest. But I do believe there is a person out there who will love you for all your imperfections and messiness. And those kinds of people will be with you for a very long time.

If you read Grimm’s fairy tales, they’re absolutely terrifying.

To be honest, Peter Pan was one of those fairy tales that I sort of related to, and I think that’s the case with a lot of kids. The whole idea of escapism really resonates with a lot of kids.

My son Cooper has just turned ten and the sarcasm fairy has already started to take up residence inside his body. Not only am I living with my mother – again! – but I’ve also got her mini-me to contend with.

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.

When I was four years old, my father, who was a colonel in the army, was stationed in Salzburg, Austria. Across the street from our house was an ancient castle on a cliff. So when I first heard fairy tales, I felt as if the magic of ‘Cinderella’ or ‘Sleeping Beauty’ was taking place right in my own neighborhood.

The escape to an unchallenging fairy tale can be very nice and I’m all for that, but film can also challenge you to confront the realities of our world.

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

I like Cinderella, I really do. She has a good work ethic. I appreciate a good, hard-working gal. And she likes shoes. The fairy tale is all about the shoe at the end, and I’m a big shoe girl.

There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.

I’ve always been a huge fantasy fan. I was always interested in fairy tales and anything with magic or dragons… I was always drawn to those types of stories.

‘Crystal Fairy’ was one of the first movies I did after I recommitted to the idea of acting.

Just about every science whiz can tell you how he or she took apart the TV or the radio when they were kids just to see how it worked. To see what the world was made of. Well, when I was a kid, I took apart fairy tales to see how they worked. To see what the world was made of.

It wasn’t until I was an adult reader that I began to fathom the influence of fairy tales on writers I was in love with over the years, from Louisa May Alcott to Bernard Malamud to John Cheever to Anne Frank to Joy Williams.

My relationship with Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm reaches far back into my childhood. I grew up with Grimm’s fairy tales. I even saw a theater production of ‘Tom Thumb‘ during Advent at the State Theater in Danzig, which my mother took me to see.