Top 83 Quotes & Sayings by Gail Simone

Nothing really prevented me from showing Catman as bi, but it's how I thought of him.

I feel humanity is often displayed in how we react to our mistakes and the misdeeds committed against us.

My thing with the Secret Six is that they never win. The odds are always against them; everyone wants them gone. So they never win. But they never give up, either.

What I feel responsible for is, if my name is on a comic, I want it to be the best-written comic that I can possibly do. I want it to include some new things we haven't seen before, new story ideas, new characters. Quality, quality art, all those kinds of things.

I just like to write stories about people who survive even very difficult, impossible things.

If you love Tarzan, you can read stories from the 'Jungle Tales of Tarzan,' where he's just a kid, all the way up until he has a son of his own and beyond. Same with 'Batman' - you can follow him from Gotham, as a kid, to 'Dark Knight,' as a cranky old weirdo. I really love that.

Greg Rucka always writes lovely, believable female characters in books like 'Whiteout,' 'Queen and Country,' and 'Lazarus.' I am a fan of Kelly Sue DeConnick, who does a wonderful female lead in 'Captain Marvel.' And DC's 'Batwoman' is currently the only book at the Big Two with a lesbian solo lead character, and it's always outstanding.

'Batgirl' and 'Harley Quinn' are the first DC hit books in a while that aren't starring Batman personally, really. But some of the attempts to reach the female audience have been really depressing to me.

We have so many fantastic creators - female creators as well as male creators that have their own followings, their own fans, and their own books that are successful.

I think Tumblr tends to be - you can get more in-depth with things and more blogging, and Tumblr has been real great for me in terms of research because I have contacts with people from all walks of life all over the globe.

Famously, DC has been pretty great showing gay women, with characters like Batwoman, but has shown fewer prominent men on the sexuality spectrum outside of hetero. It's something we need to address. I also think it's lovely how the readers respond to this.

I don't need every book to have female creators, I don't care if there are books that appeal mostly to guy readers. I don't care if some books have cheesecake. I am fine with all of that. It's the not allowing anything else that makes me furious.

The 'Womanthology' book got a lot of people jobs, inside and outside the industry, and I think stuff like that tends to be really effective. You have something in print that you can point an editor or a publisher to, and it makes a huge difference for a lot of people.

I get very invested in characters; it's the only way I find that I can write a book and really make it work.

With 'Red Sonja', it's a single character leading a book although there's a supporting cast, whereas 'Secret Six' is basically six characters who have equal time and equal place in the book, so it's got a team dynamic that 'Red Sonja' doesn't have.

As time goes on, at both DC and Marvel, characters notch up so many victories that we often start to think of them as infallible, which is kind of death for adventure fiction.

I have worked with a lot of great artists, including some of my heroes like Michael Golden, George Perez, and Jose Garcia Lopez, just to name a couple. I have been spoiled.

Catman - what I really like about him is he's a really grounded character in terms of - he's an excellent tracker. We're giving him a set of new skills for 'Secret Six' as it starts again anew. But he's very sexy, very dangerous, unpredictable.

It's time for a trans hero in a mainstream comic.

I was a fan of the idea of Red Sonja, but the gender politics of the character made her hard to read, for me, at times.

One of the things I am most excited about personally is a five-issue anthology I put together, 'Legends of Red Sonja,' which is full of wonderful little short stories written exclusively by my favorite female writers of comics, prose, and gaming.

First, hugely popular and talented romance/dark fantasy author Meljean Brook gives a really deep, wonderful story. She's clearly spent so much time thinking about the world of Sonja and her story in particular, it could easily have been a novel of its own.

When I started in comics, people were always trying to classify me as either/or. Either a writer who appealed to women or a writer who appealed to guys. This need to categorize was just exhausting.

When I think about Plastic Man, he was genuinely the first funny super hero. I'm obviously attracted to that. There's also this great mixture of tragedy in there, too, that I love. The humor comes from a place of pain.

I always say, if a guy writes the same lead female character type over and over, we are not seeing their writing chops so much as their dating website wishlist.

I've written, like, 450 comics, and 'Secret Six' was the first one I've had ship late, ever. So it took a lot to make that happen. So we had a little bit of a stop-and-start, and then we had Convergence, and then Issue No. 2 of 'Secret Six'.

The stuff we're seeing in 'Deadpool' and 'Harley Quinn' now, Plastic Man was doing in the 1940s. It's a character that was ahead of its time back then and the stories are still funny and still relevant.

I've always said my whole career that I wanted to write by the improv credo, 'don't negate,' which means, even if you didn't care for something, you try to make it work. You don't say, 'Oh, that particular story didn't happen.'

I like DC, and I love the DC Universe. It's a source of never-ending joy to me.

My favorite characters are always the unpredictable ones, and with Domino, you literally never know which way the dice are going to roll.

I feel like Vertigo is a place to have an adult discussion for adult readers.

I have been involved in lots of crossover and event books, and the truth is, I dearly love them. I love stories that actually take advantage of the huge DC library and catalog - that stuff thrills me.

I love any books by Kelly Sue DeConnick or Marjorie M. Liu; it's lovely to have successful, talented female writers doing great work in comics.

Ideas are not - ideas come at me all the time; it's just the way I'm wired. It's just a matter of focusing it in and figuring out what to do with that.

If you succeed at all, you find yourself suddenly working with artists whose work you don't just admire but you deeply love.

I looked out into the audience, saw dozens of faces I knew well - LGBTQ folks, mostly - all avid comics readers and superhero fans and DC supporters, and it just hit me: Why was this so impossible? Why in the world can we not do a better job of representation of not just humanity, but also our own loyal audience?

I think it's important to have diversity in comics for a thousand reasons. It's not just some airy conceptual thing: it's important to reflect the humanity of the readership.

I always look for a story that hasn't been told in the same way. I don't care about a lot of the usual elements people use for a quick drama boost. I want to know, for example, what happens when a man who was victimized by his father tries to be a father to a woman sixty years his senior.

I love DC. I love the people there, and I am deeply in love with that universe, but it meant that for a long time, when other offers came up, I always had to turn them down.

People resist and fight against things that are new that they haven't seen before, especially if they make them uncomfortable. But fiction is a safe place to tell these stories and to reach out to people and maybe affect them and make a difference in their lives.

I admire writers who can remain objective and distanced, but that doesn't seem to be in my toolbox somehow. I have to care, I have to have skin in the game.

When I think about Plastic Man, he was genuinely the first funny super hero.

Leaving a book is hard - 'Secret Six' was a book that people cared about. Even years later, the digital sales are great; the trades and single issues are expensive and highly sought after. It was meaningful to a lot of readers, which is endlessly gratifying.

A lot of readers and a lot of editors had a story problem with Oracle, in that she made for such an easy, convenient story accelerator, that we missed the sense of having characters have to struggle to discover, to solve mysteries. Famously, it helped make Batman less of a detective and more of a monster hunter.

When I write a team book, it's all about how they relate to each other and what they bring to the team and the book. Whether it's Black Canary and Huntress or Bane and Scandal, I look for a relationship that people can believe in, that they want to follow and learn more about.

I do a lot of book signings and conventions every year, and I meet a great many readers who are struggling... they're working through illness, injury, addiction, depression, grief, or some other trauma. It seems to me that there's a lot of heroism in fighting those things as well, as best you can.

Secret Six has always had a special place in the DCU, just because they're the misfits. The content is a little bit different than the rest of the mainstream titles. It has a completely different tone than any of the other books out there.

I'm excited for Christy Marx taking over 'Birds of Prey'. I adore 'Rachel Rising' by the great Terry Moore. I'm also a stone cold Scott Snyder fan; the guy is a joy to read and a pleasure to work with.

Red Sonja, she was a hellraiser before Buffy, Xena, and Ripley even existed. When so many heroines in comics were all hung up on romance and the bizarre gender politics of comics at the time, Sonja was out cutting off the heads of dragons and pirates.

I get asked a lot about writing for games and prose and film, and I will do some, but I can never see myself leaving comics. I love it too much.

I try to make every issue new-reader friendly. I remember being frustrated many times trying to pick up new series that were overladen with baggage. The trick is to make that backstory seem like something compelling that they will want to explore rather than an obstacle course they have to crawl through to get to the story.

People who support Kickstarter, we love them all. We're so grateful we have these products out here that allowed us to keep the copyrights and own them and everything, but people don't realize just how massive an undertaking it is.

A lot of action heroes, we're told they are heroic primarily because they commit violence upon the bad guy. It can be cathartic; it can be thrilling. But at some point, I think you want more from your heroes than just the ability and willingness to pummel someone.

For me, even though I love, love, love both Cliff Chiang and Brian Azzarello, I haven't read the new '52 Wonder Woman' past the first issue. It's just... you know, once I'm on a book for a really long time... it's like going through a divorce. It takes a while before I can be 'friends again' with the character.

The fishnets on Black Canary never bothered me: they fit her character. It's the same for me with the bikini... most people don't wear a lot of clothes in these stories, and it's a big part of what makes her instantly recognizable. Do I want her in a raincoat? Not really.

If you have something to say, especially that's different and needed, then do it.

I have a terrific editor in Molly Mahan - she's the best - and Red Sonja has become up there with Black Canary as my favorite character to write, ever.

Part of the joy of my career, for me, has been giving these iconic females a bit of shading of that unapologetic female vibe. I think it's an interesting approach.

I've said this many times: I don't care which hero punches which hero to get the Infinity Jockstrap or whatever. I do care that people find humanity in these stories, and maybe something connects, makes the world a little better for having read it.

My career path is the weirdest thing. I was a hairdresser, I worked at Marvel for a few months, and then I was signed to a DC exclusive for eight years.