Quote collection
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"The cliché I tried to avoid was I hated "teenage sidekicks." I always figured if I were a superhero, there's no way on God's earth that I'm gonna pal around with some teenager. So my publisher insisted I have a teenager in the series, because they always felt teenagers won't read the books unless there's a teenager in the story; which is nonsense."
"I've been very lucky. All I wanted was to pay the rent. Then these characters took off and suddenly there were Hulk coffee mugs and Iron Man lunchboxes and The Avengers sweatshirts everywhere. Money's okay, but what I really like is working."
"Comming from your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man"
"I'm sort of a pressure writer. If somebody says, "Stan, write something," and I have to have it by tomorrow morning, I'll just sit down and I'll write it. It always seems to come to me. But I'm better doing a rushed job because if it isn't something that's due quickly, I won't work on it until it becomes almost an emergency and then I'll do it."
"I think almost everybody enjoyed fairy tales when they were young, tales of witches and ogres and monsters and dragons and so forth. You get a little bit older, you can't read fairy tales any more."
"When I was a kid, I loved reading Sherlock Holmes. Now, you don't think of him as a superhero, but he was so damn much smarter than anybody else."
"It's a tremendous challenge, because there have been so many characters created over the years. Every time you think you come up with a great name, you find out somebody has already done it. Dreaming up the stories isn't that hard, but coming up with a good title is the toughest part."
"There's never a time when I'm not working. I don't take vacations."
"What did Doctor Doom really want? He wanted to rule the world. Now, think about this. You could walk across the street against a traffic light and get a summons for jaywalking, but you could walk up to a police officer and say "I want to rule the world," and there's nothing he can do about it, that is not a crime. Anybody can want to rule the world. So, even though he was the Fantastic Four's greatest menace, in my mind, he was never a criminal!"
"If you're going to write something, that's going to be read by people, a lot of people, you hope it will not only entertain them but maybe do them some good in some way."
"Once, I'd written a Western story, and one of the panels was just a hand holding a six-shooter, and there was a puff of smoke coming out of the barrel, and a straight horizontal line, indicating the trajectory of the bullet. So that page was sent back to me from the Code office, saying that the particular panel was too violent. I asked them what they meant, and they told me--I swear--"The puff of smoke is too big." Well, of course. So I had the artist make the smoke a little smaller, and the youth of America was saved."
"I thought it would be fun to take the kind of character that nobody would like, none of our readers would like, and shove him down their throats and make them like him."
"You can read a Shakespeare play, but does that mean you wouldn't want to see it on the stage?"
"I don't really see a need to retire as long as I am having fun."
"To tell you the truth, I never thought of myself as much of a success."
"Nobody likes to be preached to."
"Some people are able to not only entertain the public in any way that they can but also in some way to throw in some sort of inspirational message with the entertainment. I have always tried to do that with whatever I wrote. And I'm sure that a lot of other writers do, too."
"I think superheroes are bigger than life and they're very colorful."
"Everything has changed and we're all living in one city now. What happens somewhere affects things everywhere, so I have to be careful and whatever stories I work on, I want them to have redeeming moral values."
"My problem is I don't see and hear that well, so when I go to the movies, I can make out what's going on, but I can't hear what they're saying. And after the movie, I have to ask whoever I'm with "now, what was that all about?""