Stan Lee Quotes

At the end of the day, Cameron won’t be a cyberkinetic superhero ready to save the world. He’ll be a boy, standing in front of a girl, offering her the meager gift of his heart and hoping that it’s enough.

But she didn’t know that when she was younger; then, the classroom was just a place that transformed itself based on whatever she was supposed to learn that day, like the Room of Requirement.

That person who helps others simply because it should or must be done, and because it is the right thing to do, is indeed without a doubt, a real superhero.

They are working on The Fantastic Four, The Silver Surfer, Iron Man, Dr. Strange, The Hulk— they're doing a sequel to Spider-Man, a sequel to X-Men, and probably a third sequel to Blade. They still haven't gotten around to Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.— they have to do the Ghost Rider.

As comics writers we had to have villains in our stories. And once World War II started, the Nazis gave us the greatest villains in the world to fight against. It was a slam dunk.

Are you tryin' to defeat me by talking me to death?!' — Peter Parker

I am going to die. Not in the goth existential way of overwrought poetry, all, “I stood upon the stage of life and saw Death, my dark-eyed lover, flipping me the bird from the back row,” but in the very literal sense that something’s going to happen to make his heart stop beating in, oh, say the next five minutes.

To me you can wrap all of Judaism up in one sentence, and that is, 'Do not do unto others...' All I tried to do in my stories was show that there's some innate goodness in the human condition. And there's always going to be evil; we should always be fighting evil.

Marvel is a cornucopia of fantasy, a wild idea, a swashbuckling attitude, an escape from the humdrum and the prosaic. It's a serendipitous feast for the mind, the eye, the imagination, a literate celebration of unbridled creativity, coupled with a touch of rebellion and an insolent desire to spit in the eye of the dragon.

The only advice anybody can give is if you want to be a writer, keep writing. And read all you can, read everything.

Of what import are brief, nameless lives . . . to Galactus?

If you have an idea that you think is genuinely good don't let some idiot talk you out of it.

[M]ost writers — and I think it’s an unfortunate thing — they try to write something that they think a certain audience might enjoy. I’ve never been able to do that, because I can’t put myself in the mind of other people. I only know what I enjoy. So every time I’ve written a story, I’ve always tried to write the sort of story that I, myself would enjoy reading, a story that would interest me while I’m writing it as I’m waiting to find out what happens next. And I can’t know what other people think, but I can know what I think, and I feel. I’m not that unusual. If there’s a type of story I like, there must be lots of people who like the same type of stories. Therefore, I have always written to please myself, not to please a certain type of audience, because you can’t know the audience as well as you know yourself.

We tried to make our characters as human and empathetic as possible. Instead of merely emphasizing their super feats, we attempted to make their personal life and personal problems as realistic and as interesting as possible. We wanted to make them seem like real people whom the reader would like to spend time with and want to know better.

The pleasure of reading a story and wondering what will come next for the hero is a pleasure that has lasted for centuries and, I think, will always be with us.