I'm a man of the marketplace as well as an artist. I'm a pawnbroker of myth.
Nothing is as contagious as enthusiasm. It is the real allegory of the myth of Orpheus; it moves stones, and charms brutes. It is the genius of sincerity, and truth accomplishes no victories without it.
I actually met a producer of Stanley Kubrick's who told me that Kubrick had never even thought about doing Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer. He just read it and didn't want to do it - that's it. There's a myth around that he said it's not filmable. But he never wanted to film it.
Myth embodies the nearest approach to absolute truth that can be stated in words.
Iker Casillas is a legend, a myth, and myths do not give up just like that.
Facing the kitsch aesthetic is the unfathomable world of myths.
When myth meets myth, the collision is very real.
Myth is the practical metabolism of our soulish life, the logic of our obsessions and oversights for which we have no language or code. Myth is the "morality" that the ineffable puts upon us, our unaccountable imperatives, our inexplicably selective clarity and obscurity, the mortal one-sidedness of our talents and wits, the passion and apathy that make such a transient passage through our hapless minds; that weave a pattern of fatality others will see before we do. Myth is distinctively human or sublime higher-order instinct, the "reason" in culture that reason knows not of.
Something you discover as a writer is that actresses who are successful are incredibly smart. For some reason, there's this myth that if you're a beautiful actress, you're not bright, you're a puppet. But it's completely the opposite. These are people with a finely tuned sense of story, and who are also strong and articulate. You have to be, to be a woman holding your own on TV and film sets.
Opening a play is just tough. The idea that actors are weirdly protected from it is a myth. If you imagine yourself having to spend two and a bit hours cooking bolognaise, remembering a whole major work by David Hare and speaking it at the correct moment between chopping carrots and stirring the onions in front of an audience - the normal human response is 'Please, can I go to the airport?'
Music is our myth of the inner life.
A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.
There are so many myths out there about Marianne Faithfull, I had to, um, detach. But I can turn it on because Marianne Faithfull is really an attitude, you know.
There's a strange myth of Anglo-Saxonism. When the University of Virginia was founded by Thomas Jefferson, for example, its law school offered the study of "Anglo-Saxon Law. " And that myth of Anglo-Saxonism carries right over into the early twentieth century.
When I got older, I chose to look at Christianity as another myth.
But myth is something else than an explanation of the world, of history, and of destiny.
So long as the majority of Canadians have two countries, one here and one in Europe, national unity will remain a myth and a constant source of internecine quarrels.
There is a city myth that country life was isolated and lonely; the truth is that farmers and their families then had a richer social life than they have now. They enjoyed a society organic, satisfying and whole, not mixed and thinned with the life of town, city and nation as it now is.
The power of both myth and art is this magical ability to open doors, to make connections - not only between us and the natural world, but between us and the rest of humanity. Myths show us what we have in common with every other human being, no matter what culture we come from, no matter what century we live in. . . and at the same time, mythic stories and art celebrate our essential differences.
Some part of me knew from the first that what I wanted was not reality but myth.