Top 118 Quotes & Sayings by Brian K. Vaughan - Page 2

What cruel creatures men are. Our bodies tell us to love so many, but there's room in our hearts for so few.

You'd never be able to convince someone to give you money to do a bilingual story where you're not translating half of it - you'd drive people crazy. But in comics, you can do whatever your heart desires.

Happy endings are bullshit. There are only happy pauses.

I'm really happiest living life 22 pages at a time and putting things in little boxes on pages.

I think some people are just very passionate that things remain the way they were when they were kids.

No. No, first comes boyhood. You get to play with soldiers and spacemen, cowboys and ninjas, pirates and robots. But before you know it, all that comes to an end. And then, Remo Williams, is when the adventure begins.

Gert: Wake me when the fight scene's over. Kitty Pryde: Oy, tell me about it. Hey, I'm Kitty. You the token pacifist of your group? Gert: Not exactly. Pacifists are like vegans, I'm more of a vegetarian. I enjoy fish and occasional maulings.

I'm the one who started spreading that particular factoid, about Bendis, Azz and me all being bald Brian's from Cleveland, just to get my name mentioned in the same sentence as two much-better writers, and it's worked like a goddamn charm. Next up, I'm going to grow a big, disgusting beard, just so people will start talking about Alan Moore and me in the same breath.

Brubaker and Phillipss books have always been about eight years ahead of their time.

I've written about teenage heroes before, on Marvel's Runaways, and I remember at the time when I pitched it, it was a team that had more female members than males. Even that caused of much discussion about, "Will there be a market for this, and should there at least be equal number of male and females?"

Victor: You guys have some kind of rallying cry? You know, "Avengers assemble?" "It's clobberin' time?" "Hulk smash?" Nico: "Try not to die.

Well, I always talk about how I used to work at an insane asylum and stuff, which is true, but to be honest, I just make crap up more than anything else.

Your own creations are your own children; you gave life to them, so you'll always have, if not more passion to them, more connections to them.

I realized that for fantasy and science fiction, especially from my youth, white was the default. Luke Skywalker was in the lead, or even if you were a hobbit, you're going to be white. That was an extremely old-fashioned, obviously really narrow-minded way to look at things.

I mean, do you know what you get when you call a suicide hotline in New York city? A busy signal. Literally.

People just want good stories.

Violence is stupid. Even as a last resort, it only ever begets more of the same.

Immigration confuses and terrifies me, so why not try to write a comic and make some sense of it?

Doesn't matter if it's personal or professional, a good partnership takes work.

When a man carries an instrument of violence, he'll always find the justification to use it.

It's TV shows like 'Buffy' and 'Angel' that usually have an incredible cliffhanger every commercial break that amaze me.

How is it possible that our parents lied to us?" "Lets see: Santa, the Tooth Fairy,the Easter bunny,um, God. You're the prettiest kid in school. This wont hurt a bit. Your face will freeze like that..." "Everythings going to be alright.

They hurt you. You hurt 'em back. Or maybe it is the other way around. Whatever. Someday you might find a way to forgive each other. But it won't be like it used to 'cause that pain never really goes away.

I like things that are weirdly imaginative and couldn't be real, but I also like stories that are recognizable and relatable.

I write the book for one person — for Fiona [Staples, the artist]. I spend a lot of time just thinking how she'll react to things and manipulating her into drawing perverse, horrific things. It's a really weird job but I enjoy it.

Reef aquariums are definitely the pinnacle of the hobby.

When I was in college, I was belittling the woman who later become my wife for not knowing who Boba Fett was, and she responded by asking me if I knew who the Prime Minister of Israel was. Surprisingly? Not Mon Mothma.

There are a lot of differing opinions on that. Some people think you should change out more, but I think changing just 20 percent is less stressful on the aquarium and fish. Once you get used to the regimen, it's pretty easy.

We describe [Paper Girls] as Stand By Me meets Terminator.It's a story about nostalgia and childhood, but with an action-packed, sci-fi bent.

I've never gotten anything but support and thanks from people for having diverse books.

I've never had any interest in retelling stories from my youth.

There's a lot of fiction from that period that we're nostalgic for.

Not a word of my writing has ever been changed by another person's hands, and I don't think many screenwriters can say that.

We've all seen lots of stories about a young protagonist having adventures, and usually they're all boys, [and] there is sometimes a token female, or two.

I grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland in 1988 and there was just one year where suddenly all of the delivery kids that used to be boys were suddenly girls. It happened at our church too. Altar boys were suddenly altar girls. There was just this sense that all these young women knew there were openings here to be the first of their kind.

There are only three forms of high art: the symphony, the illustrated children's book and the board game.

Just go out there and get your heart broken in, so it'll be ready when you really need it.

I've been fortunate enough to travel to comic conventions in Portugal, France, Canada, and it's an honor to get to meet people from all over the world.

I remember seeing Stand by Me, when I was around 12, and just feeling like, "This is so refreshing to see kids swear and smoke cigarettes like my friends." It just felt much more real than the Sesame Street version of childhood that I'd been spoon-fed.

These are the young women [in Stand by Me] that we grew up knowing and hopefully they feel a little rough around the edges, because it's true to life.

It's just people who grew up in that time are suddenly old enough to be creators themselves, but I think they have a little perspective. I'm 40 now, and I have children of my own. Before I forget my own childhood completely, I want to take some time to take a look at the '80s and think back.

I've always thought of fantasy as a genre of best-case scenarios, and horror as a genre of worst-case scenarios.

I just want to take a realistic look now, now that we have enough distance.

I know I'm a grumpy old man, but I'm always more delighted by readers talking about the actual comics than people talking about how eager they are to have their favorite comics be "elevated" into another medium. Adaptations are great, but for me, comics have always been the destination, not a stepping-stone to get somewhere else.

We're always looking roughly 30 years behind us. In the '80s they were obsessed with the '50s and so on.

We're not trying to be deliberately frustrating, but we are laying the tracks for a mystery, and it's one that we have all figured out. We wanted this to be kind of like the way that Cliff [Chang] and I felt about the Cold War in the '80s when we were 12.

Each collected edition of Paper Girls that we put out will largely be set in an entirely different era.

I'm still digesting the '90s. It takes some time to get perspective.

As you get older you start to see these events and leaders, and movements of the pendulum swinging back.

I think a lot of creators are attracted to those toys they got to play with when they were young, and everyone wants to write a Superman story or a Batman story or a Spider-Man story. I don't know, if it's been successful for me, it should be successful for anyone. "Hit the ground with your feet running" is the secret of breaking new characters when it seems like no one else is having any luck.

I love that the book [Paper Girls ] gets to kind of evolve and change in each era. Our third storyline is our best so far.

To try and imagine that I'm another person is always going to be hard - whether I'm writing about a truck driver or someone who is gay, who's trans, who is of a different ethnicity or creed. But it would be boring if I always had to write about myself and my limited viewpoint.

I genuinely am sort of an emotionally stunted man-child, so if I just write to the top of my intelligence, it sounds like a teenager. I like being around teenagers. It's good for drama; they feel everything much more intensely than adults do, their lives are much more interesting than ours. They're mutants. They have these weird bodies that are rebelling against them and changing every day. Teenagers always equal good drama.

The appealing thing about comics: There literally is no budget in comics. You're only limited by your imagination.

There's a lot of dark stuff from the '80s that we don't think about.

The longer I've been writing scripts, the more I find that you have to give the artist more leeway or else you'll just be disappointed. You can't force them to draw every image that's in your head. Since I'm a horrific artist, I wouldn't want them to anyway. So I definitely give them a lot more leeway now than I did at the beginning.

There's just something about that late '80s that suddenly feels like it has something to teach us.

It was interesting looking back at the '80s and trying to find newspaper headlines from the time - the cliché of history repeating itself.