Marina Warner
Marina Warner
Dame Marina Sarah Warner, DBE, FRSL, FBAis a British novelist, short story writer, historian and mythographer. She is known for her many non-fiction books relating to feminism and myth. She has written for many publications, including The London Review of Books, the New Statesman, Sunday Times, The Telegraph and Vogue. She has been a visiting professor, given lectures and taught on the faculties of many universities...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionNon-Fiction Author
Date of Birth9 November 1946
Marina Warner quotes about
book night skills
Many of the enchanted things in the book are lamps, carpets, sofas, gems, brass rings. It is a rather different landscape than the fairy tale landscape of the West. Though we have interiors and palaces, we don't have bustling cities, and there isn't the emphasis on the artisan making things. The ambiance from which they were written was an entirely different one. The Arabian Nights comes out of a huge world of markets and trade. Cairo, Basra, Damascus: trades and skills.
mirrors trying aliens
I shop online because I don't like to try things on in front of an alien mirror.
people cosmos culture
If you want to learn about a culture, you look at what buildings the people lived in but you also want to know about their cosmos.
photographer young bookworms
When I was young, I did actually model and was much photographed by famous photographers. But I was always a bookworm.
taken writing thinking
I do not think commodities are taken for granted. One of the convergences in time I noticed, and to me seemed very important, was the emergence of paper money. There had been permissionary notes, exchanging money by writing it, but there was no duplicated form of guaranteeing an exchange.
gentleman special world
The sombre-suited masculine world of the Protestant religion is altogether too much like a gentlemen's club to which the ladies are only admitted on special days.
heart journey humanity
A society that doesn't know any longer how to observe every death with proper rituals, that does not know that death is not the end, but only part of the journey, has lost its way, has had the very heart of its humanity torn out.
mother men maps
Fairy tales are about money, marriage, and men. They are the maps and manuals that are passed down from mothers and grandmothers to help them survive.
children husband book
There are a range of women not represented in the Western fairy tale tradition. Husband-beaters are particularly interesting, as well as male pederasts. Children are often told in The Arabian Nights, "This man likes to abduct boys, be careful of him." These issues are explored through the medium of the stories, but actually the architecture of the book is such that there are many examples of women who are loyal, brave, devoted - especially to their lovers.
memories writing age
The tales are quite hard to remember and I found that going back to it between bouts of writing fiction, I was having to retrace my steps quite a lot, because the stories are very intricate and the material is elusive, and possibly with age, my memory is not as malleable as it used to be.
children real men
I don't think that there's a target audience at all. These stories were in circulation. The stories were told by men, told in the marketplace by men, but also behind doors by women, but there's no real record of this. It's likely they were told by women to children in their interior rooms. The story could be a negative story, they could be presented as a, "Watch out! Women will get round you, do things to you, weave you in their toils." It could be buried in it an old cautionary story about women and their wiles.
book men mirrors
The technique of the book and the technique carried by the figure of Scheherazade is one of opening the Sultan's mind. He's emblematic of the ignorant person: the ignorant, lock-in, raging man who wants to kill all he doesn't understand. The model of the book is the extraordinary, very-large, Mirror of Princes.
book mind enchantment
Although the stories are very present in my book, and very present in my mind, what I was most interested in was the question of why it had attracted such a following in the 18th Century. It's less mysterious that it attracted a following in the Romantic period, and in the 19th Century, but the early 18th Century when the Rationalists fell in love with it...that was mysterious. What I wanted to look at was the forms of enchantment.
fun book writing
Though it's marvelously entertaining, and I had fantastic fun writing the book, it's not terribly easily, the material, and it's not all that familiar...although we think it is familiar. The processes of the wonderful narratives are very intricate. It's about the charm - the spellbinding charm - of ingenuity, and it's not so easy to remember the plots or the structure or even the names.