Fairy tales are the skeletons of story, perhaps. Reading them often provides an uneasy sensation—a gnawing familiarity—that comforting yet supernatural awareness of living inside a story.

I love the idea of the vignette, which is associated with the decorative, illustrative, small, and thus with the feminine, and thus easily maligned. I mean, Emily Dickinson wrote vignettes, right?

When humans become gods, when our wings grow so great as to beat about the very edges of the earth, no one can answer but us.

From sentence to sentence, in fairy tales there is no reality that is subordinated to any other. Just as, outside the pages there is no reality.

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

Beer bottles, whiskey bottles, brown glass, green. They fell to the lawn and I'd feel serene. Adam was king to my stilted queen.

Fairy tales represent hundreds of years of stories based on thousands of years of stories told by hundreds, thousands, perhaps even millions of tellers.

You couldn't escape the pointy hat, though. There was nothing magical about a pointy hat except that it said that the woman underneath it was a witch. People paid attention to a pointy hat.

Adversity is the first path to truth.

I don't know how to live good. I only know how to suffer.

Always question your fear, Anh. there's almost never a good reason to be scared.

When a street musician lowered his violin to inquire, 'Hey lovely, what you got there?' she said, 'Musicians who ask questions,' and kept on dragging.

Everyone knows there's only one thing less welcome on a stage than a mime, and that's a clown, because everyone knows that clowns eat people.

Wines are like people. Some are perfect but boring, some are precocious but fail to live up to their promise, and some may be flawed, but the way they may develop is endlessly fascinating.

I don't know what another actor is going to give me, on the day, and I don't want to be so hard and fast in my technique that I'm not open to what's coming.

I've always sort of time-locked and mind-blocked myself in my 30s, and that's always the age I feel.

I cannot solve the problem of life by losing myself in the problem of art.