A Quote by Edmond de Goncourt

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

Edmond de Goncourt

Quote Topics

Fairy Fairy Tale Fairy Tales Humbug Like People Simple Tales True

Quote Author

Edmond de Goncourt
French - Writer
May 26, 1822 - July 16, 1896

[Fairy tales] are like a journey to the woods and the many ways you can get lost. Some people say it's not a good idea to read fairy tales to anyone under the age of eight because they are brutal and raw. When I was a kid I often felt that kids's books were speaking down to me, but I never felt that way about fairy tales. They are bloody and scary, but so is life.

Alice Hoffman

Fairy tales have always been about getting through the worst of everything, the darkest and the deepest and the bloodiest of events. They are about surviving, and what you look like when you emerge from the trial. The reason we keep telling fairy tales over and over, that we need to keep telling them, is that the trials change. So the stories change too, and the heroines and villains and magical objects, to keep them true. Fairy tales are the closets where the world keeps its skeletons.

Catherynne M. Valente

I didn't like fairy tales when I was younger. I found a lot of fairy tales scary. They really didn't sit well with me.

Amanda Seyfried

Fairy tales are my natural language. I feel at ease telling fairy tales like a fish feels in water. I am totally free.

Michel Ocelot

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.

Amy Tan

I think dreams can come true, but not necessarily like fairy-tales. It's not always so perfect like that.

Patrick Dempsey

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.

Alice Hoffman

It could have been like a fairy tale. But fairy tales aren't real. Things don't work like that. There's a price for everything.

Maureen Johnson

The fact that fairy tales remain a literary underdog - undervalued and undermined - even as they shape so many popular stories, redoubles my certainty that it is time for contemporary fairy tales to be celebrated in a popular, literary collection. Fairy tales hold the secret to reading.

Kate Bernheimer

I think almost everybody enjoyed fairy tales when they were young, tales of witches and ogres and monsters and dragons and so forth. You get a little bit older, you can't read fairy tales any more.

Stan Lee

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.

Kate Forsyth

Fantasy is, I believe, the great nourisher of imagination. To paraphrase Einstein on how to develop intelligence in young people: Read fairy tales. Then read more fairy tales.

Lloyd Alexander

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.

Mike Myers

I grew up watching monster movies and horror movies, which I felt were like fairy tales and I think this always spoke to me. Something about that is symbolism - the beauty and the magic which helps me work with film and start making modern fairy tales.

Tim Burton

I think people are interested in anything that's a little bigger than life and that's colorful and - you know, what they like? They like fairy tales for grownups.

Stan Lee

When fairy tales are written in the west, they're known as folklore. In the east, fairy tales are called religions.