Art & Creativity Quote by Cornelia Funke

There’s a quiet reversal baked into Funke’s line: the artist who assumed she’d invented herself learns, secondhand, that her imagination has a passport stamp. The first clause is a familiar modern posture - autonomy, originality, the belief that influence is something you can audit and deny. Then comes the pivot: it’s English readers who identify “motives from German fairytales” in her work, as if cultural DNA becomes visible only when you cross a border.

The phrasing matters. Funke doesn’t say “themes” or “archetypes,” terms that would sound curated and self-aware. She says “motives,” a word that suggests recurring impulses and narrative engines - the kinds of story-logic you absorb before you can name them. Fairytales, especially German ones, are blunt instruments: forests as moral testing grounds, bargains that come due, childhood peril treated with unsentimental clarity. Funke’s fantasy often carries that same weather: wonder edged with consequence.

The subtext is less about folklore trivia than about authorship itself. Influence isn’t always a conscious apprenticeship; it’s the background radiation of language, bedtime stories, and national narrative habits. That she hears this “from many people” underscores how reception completes the text. Readers don’t just consume stories; they triangulate them, locating origins the author may have emotionally outgrown or intellectually discounted.

Contextually, it’s also a soft argument for translation and cultural exchange: you only notice what’s “German” about a story when it’s being read in English, where the familiar turns strange enough to be recognized.