Jack Zipes Quotations

Though the Grimms kept about 100 of the tales from the first edition, they changed them a good deal.

What is most disturbing today is that we use rational methods to cultivate the tastes and values of the young in all kinds of educational, religious, and cultural institutions that are predicated on corporate practices and goals. Everything we do to, with, and for our children is influenced by capitalist market conditions and the hegemonic interests of ruling corporate elites. In simple terms, we calculate what is best for our children by regarding them as investments and turning them into commodities.

Fairy tales begin with conflict because we all begin our lives with conflict. We are all misfit for the world, and somehow we must fit in, fit in with other people, and thus we must invent or find the means through communication to satisfy as well as resolve conflicting desires and instincts.

The role of the storyteller is to awaken the storyteller in others.

The fairy tale emanates from specific struggles to humanize bestial and barbaric forces, which have terrorized our minds and communities in concrete ways, threatening to destroy free will and human compassion. The fairy tale sets out to conquer this concrete terror through metaphors.

Inevitably they find their way into the forest. It is there that they lose and find themselves. It is there that they gain a sense of what is to be done. The forest is always large, immense, great and mysterious. No one ever gains power over the forest, but the forest posses the power to change lives and alter destinies.

I've tried to show in my most recent book, the 'Irresistible Fairytale', that in order to talk about any genre, particularly what we call simple genre - a myth, a legend, an anecdote, a tall tale, and so on - we really have to understand something about the origin of stories all together.

It was only after the Grimms published two editions primarily for adults that they changed their attitude and decided to produce a shorter edition for middle-class families. This led to Wilhelm's editing and censoring many of the tales.

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.

In 1995, I founded a storytelling program for children called Neighborhood Bridges in collaboration with the Children's Theatre Company of Minneapolis, which is 15 elementary schools in the Twin Cities.