I began to believe the fairy tales: You know, how we're all out there looking for our magical missing half.

I never read any fairy tales or classics until I was an adult; all we ever had was comics... No television, either. If we wanted entertainment, we hung around the fish shop.

In fairy tales, the children are saved by caring adults. We need more caring adults in the lives of our children.

My youngest son becomes an award-winning nature photographer, and I cannot resist writing poems to his pictures. My daughter loves to cook, though I do not. Yet together, we write a cookbook with fairy tales. And now a second.

I loved fairy tales as a kid, so that's where my mind gravitates.

I made fun of myself before everybody else could, so I always got the comic crowns: Freshman Fink, Sophomore Fairy, Junior Birdman. I got all three of them!

It has been a fairy tale for an outsider, bouncing from one film set to another, choosing my films as assertively as those films chose me. And through this journey I have not once faced the dreaded syndrome of the 'casting couch.'

Getting to work at Lick was like being touched by the wand of your fairy godmother.

The universe has a much greater imagination than we do, which is why the real story of the universe is far more interesting than any of the fairy tales we have invented to describe it.

In kindergarten that used to be my job, to tell them fairytales. I liked Hans Christian Andersen, and the Grimm fairy tales, all the classic fairy tales.

If you want to tell grown-up fairy tales, you have to look for the dark side.

Maybe even at six or seven, I knew that, sweet as they were on the surface, all fairy tales needed a feminist shake up.

Fairy tales, before they were sanitized, were very dark, and kids love that. 'Coraline' by Neil Gaiman feels like Beckett for kids. I think there's plenty of room for that. And I think there's a danger of being too patronizing to children, having things too sanitized.

Things aren't always the fairy tale that you thought they were.

My mother's childhood was complex, disjointed, and disturbing. As children, we would gather round and ask her to tell us again and again The Story of Her Childhood. It was Grimmsian, Andersenesque: a classic fairy tale replete with goodies and baddies.

And now, I'm a best selling author, a different sort of fairy tale that I still sometimes wonder when I'll wake up from.

Divorce in a young-adult novel means what being orphaned meant in a fairy tale: vulnerability, danger, unwanted independence.

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

'Crystal Fairy' was one of the first movies I did after I recommitted to the idea of acting.

We may have forgotten how to feel. Nobody is teaching us how to live happily ever after, as we've heard in fairy tales.