For every once upon a time there must be a story to follow, because if a story doesn't, something else will, and it might not be as harmless as a story.

As Jane Austen might have put it: It is a truth universally acknowledged that young protagonists in search of adventure must ditch their parents.

I am a story teller. If I wanted to send a message I would have written a sermon.

There’s been terrible things we seen, en’t there? And more a coming, more’n likely. So I think I’d rather not know what’s in the future. I’ll stick to the present.

I wanted to avoid what some modern tellers have done, quite legitimately, to make fairy tales more like novels and short stories, to characterize the heroes and the heroines much more than they are characterized in Grimm. I like the psychological flatness of them, the fact that they're more like masks than individuals.

I'm with the Grimms on this: stories for young and old. You can't characterize them any better than that.

Argue with anything else, but don't argue with your own nature.