I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death.
While there are many experts in the psychoanalysis of individuals, there seems to be little active authority or understanding in the matter of the persistent shared madness in everyday life. It's as if collective mental illness doesn't exist except in the vernacular and in contemporary folk myth, where it remains trapped and politically useless.
If you take myth and folklore, and these things that speak in symbols, they can be interpreted in so many ways that although the actual image is clear enough, the interpretation is infinitely blurred, a sort of enormous rainbow of every possible colour you could imagine.
Love is a deception and a trap. Love is as big a myth that God sits with his flowing white beard in a throne and looks at us.
Somebody said to me, 'But the Beatles were anti-materialistic.' That's a huge myth. John and I literally used to sit down and say, 'Now, let's write a swimming pool.'
The electron can no longer be conceived as a single, small granule of electricity; it must be associated with a wave, and this wave is no myth; its wavelength can be measured and its interferences predicted.
The myth that people with epilepsy swallow their tongues is very injurious. When I had seizures without my roommates present, I would often wake up with my gums bleeding, my teeth hurting or my jaw aching. Often, well-intentioned people, believing I would choke on my tongue, tried to force open my clenched jaw to put in a hard object.
Anyone who thinks they stand apart from society and defies all which govern its existence has less in common with the lone wolf patriot standing up to dystopic forces of oppression - a myth - and more in common with the disease known as cancer - a harsh reality.
If I have to pick one story that most influenced 'The Hunger Games,' it would be the Greek myth of Theseus, which I read when I was about 8 years old. In punishment for past deeds, Athens periodically had to send seven youths and seven maidens to a labyrinth. In the maze was this Minotaur, and it would eat them.
In every age 'the good old days' were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them.