When I went back to England after a year away, the country seemed stuck, dozing in a fairy tale, stifled by the weight of tradition.

When I was little, I had to write down what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I wrote, 'I want to be an actress-singer-dancer because you can be a rich fairy princess and tell someone off.'

I'd always dreamed of a fairytale wedding.

I loved reading Grimm's fairy tales and Hans Christian Andersen, and I loved to dream about other worlds and other lives. Maybe that has something to do with having an incomplete family, being an only child. All I know is I loved to pretend, and all that was in tandem with my wanting to be an actress.

When I was a child, I wanted to be... a fairy. I still do, really, except that now I've now graduated to wanting to be a pixie.

All the ancient classic fairy tales have always been scary and dark.

I'll be left writing picture books and fairy tales.

'Ocean's Kingdom' is a fairy story with no subtext, no resonance - it's not about anything except its water-logged plot.

Look at Jane Austen. Her characters derive in a reasonably straight line from fairy tales.

Why should a horror film be just a horror film? To me, The Company of Wolves is a fairy tale; it's got all those elements plus a lot more. And we know that fairy tales aren't innocent any more.

Writing is writing to me. I'm incapable of saying no to any writing job, so I've done everything - historical fiction, myths, fairy tales, anything that anybody expresses any interest in me writing, I'll write. It's the same reason I used to read as a child: I like going somewhere else and being someone else.

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.'

If I wasn't a singer, I would be a fairy princess.

I took lots of photographs and had planned to write a treatise on how it worked, but I quickly got bored with that idea and wrote a scientific fairy tale instead.

I think it would be hard to find an American who, during their first week at Cambridge didn't genuinely feel like it was fairy tale.

I have written two books that have to do with fairy godmothers: 'The Magic Touch' and 'Wishing on a Star.'

One of the best things about folklore and fairy tales is that the best fantasy is what you find right around the corner, in this world. That's where the old stuff came from.

I was the original Cinderella girl, looking for the happy ending in the fairy story. But my fantasy prince never came.

In 2006, I appeared before a House subcommittee considering real estate reform. It was like visiting the capital for the 'Hunger Games' as an outsider in a glamorous and byzantine fairy tale: I couldn't believe how beautiful all the congressional aides were, and I never understood the system of bells and alarms warning legislators to vote.

What the Greeks and Romans considered myths, we consider fairy tales. We can see how very clearly the myths, which emanated from all cultures, had a huge influence on the development of the modern fairy tale.