Brits and Americans have hundreds of different phrases for the same thing. Luckily, it's usually a source of amusement rather than frustration. A flashlight by any other name is still a torch. My personal favourite is 'fairy lights,' which we boringly refer to as 'Christmas lights.'

I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the Second World War.

To be honest, Peter Pan was one of those fairy tales that I sort of related to, and I think that's the case with a lot of kids.

I love fairy tales because I think that behind fairy tales, there is always a meaning.

Like you see in the fairy tales, that's how it planned out in my head. Kids, little white picket fence, the American dream.

One of the pleasures of the original 'Grimm's Fairy Tales' is how incredibly ghastly they are. The ugly sisters have their eyes pecked out by crows.

Well, Company of Wolves was about that literally, about fairy tales.

Just about every science whiz can tell you how he or she took apart the TV or the radio when they were kids just to see how it worked. To see what the world was made of. Well, when I was a kid, I took apart fairy tales to see how they worked. To see what the world was made of.

That's what I wanted 'Pirate Jenny' to be: a queer, revolutionary fairy tale for the people that I love.

I can't just only be on reality TV and show everything when it's the fairy princess, fairytale, and then not take my hits when I have to.

When I was a kid, Santa, the Tooth Fairy, my stuffed animals - they were real. There is the tremendous suspension of disbelief that you have as a child. It's harder as an adult.

Soils and national characters differ, but fairy tales are the same in plot and incidents, if not in treatment.

Every movie, I complicate. I make the hard choices. I remember when I was pitching 'Pan's Labyrinth:' An anti-fascist fairy tale set in Civil War Spain, where the girl dies at the end. It's not easy.

I don't know what to think about magic and fairy tales.

There seems to be a real taste for the fantastical these days. People like to get back into their imaginations. Maybe there's something a little nostalgic about 'Grimm' and the fairy tales that they grew up with. And it's a very unique approach to the procedural side of things.

A peace agreement isn't like a fairy story. You don't live happily ever after.

My grandmother, Amalia Pia Emilia Vignola, whom I called Nonna, brought out the fairy tale in everything. She used to tuck me into bed so vigorously that I never felt anything less than comforted, and then afterwards, she would sit on a cane basket box next to my bed and read Hans Christian Andersen to me.

Fairy tales and folk tales have always played a role in my writing in one way or another.

One of the first houses we lived in was like out of a fairy story. We had a stream that ran through our garden, and we played with the ducks - we locked them in my mum's office, and they pooed everywhere. It was crazy, picking blackberries and mushrooms, rabbits running through your legs.

There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.