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The point of mythology or myth is to point to the horizon and to point back to ourselves: This is who we are; this is where we came from; and this is where we're going. And a lot of Western society over the last hundred years - the last 50 years really - has lost that. We have become rather aimless and wandering.

Mythology is a set of primitive lies that people rarely believe. This is rather different from history, which is a set of lies that people actually believe.

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.

Mythology is a subjective truth. Every culture imagines life a certain way.

Myths are part of our DNA. We're a civilisation with a continuous culture. The effort to modernize it keeps it alive. Readers connect with it.

One of the things I'm trying to do over and over again in my books is create new mythologies, create new ways to understand the complexity of the world. I think what mythology does is impress upon chaotic experience the patterns, hierarchies and shapes which allow us to interpret the chaos and make fresh sense of it.

Mythology is a vast body of knowledge that has not been tapped.

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

Many of us view the bible and other religious teachings as mythology.

Myth is supposed to bring us together, but fantasy alienates us.