Happiness is like those palaces in fairy tales whose gates are guarded by dragons: we must fight in order to conquer it.

Every man's life is a fairy tale written by God's fingers.

I worked with Stanley Kubrick for almost a year back in 1990, trying to develop the screen story for his project 'Artificial Intelligence,' which is about a robot boy who wishes to become a real boy, a future scientific fairy tale inspired in the myth of Pinocchio.

If you see the magic in a fairy tale, you can face the future.

I love the Queen. I love the whole fairy tale of the Royal Family; the Crown Jewels; Buckingham Palace; the tourist attraction. But really, is that what we've got a monarchy for? It's just for tourism, and then you survive and live off taxpayers' money?

My family is my little village. I really do feel like my fairy tale came true.

As children, our imaginations are vibrant, and our hearts are open. We believe that the bad guy always loses and that the tooth fairy sneaks into our rooms at night to put money under our pillow. Everything amazes us, and we think anything is possible. We continuously experience life with a sense of newness and unbridled curiosity.

I don't really care what people tell children - when you believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, one more fib won't hurt. But I am infuriated by the growing notion, posited in some touchy-feely quarters, that all women are, or can be, beautiful.

Do we believe that there is equal economic opportunity out there in the real world, right now, for each and every one of these groups? If we believed in the tooth fairy, if we believed in the Easter Bunny, we might well believe that.

I think dreams can come true, but not necessarily like fairy-tales. It's not always so perfect like that.

All I know is that I've ruled out wearing fairy wings. When I was nine I wanted to get married in fairy wings, and now I realize that's not cool anymore.

There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.

I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.

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.'

Miramax seems to be showing the same faith in Roberto Benigni's 'Pinocchio' that the Republican Party showed in Trent Lott; the live-action version of Carlo Collodi's fairy tale about the wooden puppet whose only ambition was to be a real live boy was sneaked into theaters Christmas Day.

With 'Stardust', I hope what I was doing is giving 30-year-olds and 40-year-olds and 25-year-olds and 60-year-olds a chance to get the same sense of wonder, the same feeling, the same magic, that they got in reading the classic fairy tales as children.

Almost every single commercial on television for shampoo, sports shoes, drinks, food, clothes, perfume, cars, etc., is a short fairy tale, for they are given magical qualities.

I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity.

If I'm honest I have to tell you I still read fairy-tales and I like them best of all.

A Court of Thorns and Roses' was actually inspired by three of my all-time-favorite fairy/folktales: 'Beauty and the Beast,' 'East of the Sun, West of the Moon' and 'Tam Lin.' I got the kernel of inspiration by wondering: 'What if 'Beauty' was a huntress?

When I was 11, I had an Ugly Sister birthday party. All my idea. Most girls want to be a fairy or a princess, but there I am with beauty spots and fur and fluorescent pink kiss-curls.

I love fairy tales because of their haunting beauty and magical strangeness. They are set in worlds where anything can happen. Frogs can be kings, a thicket of brambles can hide a castle where a royal court has lain asleep for a hundred years, a boy can outwit a giant, and a girl can break a curse with nothing but her courage and steadfastness.

Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary 'real' world.

I was 12 when it really hit me. I did children's theatre camp during the summers and played a fairy in 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.' The next summer, I played Clytemnestra in 'Agamemnon' and I was like, 'OK, this is amazing.'