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

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.

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

Fairytales work on two levels. On a conscious level, they are stories of true love and triumph and overcoming difficult odds and so are pleasurable to read. But they work on a deeper and symbolic level in that they play out our universal psychological dramas and hidden desires and fears.

I've come to the conclusion that mythology is really a form of archaeological psychology. Mythology gives you a sense of what a people believes, what they fear.

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?

I think that we need mythology. We need a bedrock of story and legend in order to live our lives coherently.

I definitely read a lot of books on the psychology and mythology behind fairy tales because I think that's really fascinating and there's a lot to draw on there.

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.