Top 68 Quotes & Sayings by Scott Snyder

I've always been a relatively big history buff. In college, I took a lot of history courses, and when I was in grad school, I liked to audit them.

My favorite Batman stories were very much in conversation with the zeitgeist over the years.

With books like 'AD: After Death' and 'Wytches,' a lot of those things are inspired by reading things that terrify me.

One of my favorite books was 'The Book of Immortality' by Adam Leith Gollner, which talks about cheating death and life extension and frames with a story that David Copperfield finds a fountain of youth on an island he bought.

The only way to write Batman, if you get the chance - and I hope everyone out there gets the chance - is to imagine you made him up.

I love working on 'Superman' and 'Batman' dearly.

I feel like no matter what I'm on, whether it's 'Tiny Titans' or 'Swamp Thing' or 'American Vampire,' there will be an element of horror in it. Which would be fun for 'Tiny Titans.'

I love everybody in Gotham. Gotham suits me really well. I'll write anything from 'Nightwing' to 'Batgirl' and any of the villains.

I use a lot of narration; I have a very prosaic style. I like to get you invested in the character first and do a lot of work in the first pages of each issue to try to re-establish things and keep the symbolism of a story very tucked beneath the surface.

My favorite Swamp Thing stories have always been about a man wrestling with monsters both internal and external.

I'm a difficult person, sometimes, to work with because I'm so intense about this stuff sometimes, and I get focused in ways that I think can be overwhelming for me and also the people I work with, where I'll get so about every little bug in the thing, every little line.

The Batman that I loved growing up, the thing that Frank Miller did in 'The Dark Knight Returns,' is that he's so vulnerable and mortal in his 50s. That book was the first time I saw Batman as being really layered, human, and suffering, and worried that he wouldn't achieve what he wanted to achieve. Seeing him being obsessed and pathological.

I don't know if this is the same for everybody, but for me, sometimes I get depressed, where I wake up and I can feel a change. Something went wrong, and it's almost like you feel tingly in a way where you know something is off, and from that point forward, this anxiety kicks in where you just worry and worry... this cyclical, terrible nature.

When I've gone through those periods of depression or anxiety, it's almost like your body is telling you constantly with these panics that the world really is the terrible place that you think it is, and all the things you fear are true about yourself have to be true.

The thing that really interests me is characters facing challenges that are emblematic of the things they are most frightened of about themselves.

There's an element of ego to writing the Riddler. You research a lot of things that you end up jettisoning as a writer, and Riddler was a lot of fun to get to have that sort of annoying know-it-all personality lording over the city. He's a lot of fun to write about.

I remember when I was in school I had this teacher give me this E.L. Doctorow quote: They asked him how much historical research he does for his books and he said, 'As little as possible.' So I try and adhere to that.

In a post-9/11 world, 'Batman' is less about scaring bad people into the shadows than he is about bringing good people out into the light.

With 'Batman,' I actually had a really bad period when we started 'Zero Year,' right at the beginning, I just wasn't taking care of myself at all. I was up too late all the time, I was working too hard. I wasn't exercising.

I've said before, I've always had difficulty with anxiety and depression. I've been on medication for it since I was about 18 years old, varying degrees of medication. I've had big ups and downs with it and very bad periods.

Monsters can be scary, and they're great, but they're only really scary when they're reflections of us and they show you the things you're scared of might be true about your own nature.

I grew up in New York City, so I have, like, an inherent fear of trees, I think, in general.

The secret to 'Year One' is that it's a Jim Gordon story. It's a great Bruce Wayne story, don't get me wrong, but Jim Gordon is the focus of that book. To me, that's the stronger emotional arc. It's not that the Bruce Wayne stuff isn't masterful, because it is, but it's Jim's book.

I like stories where people have to face some big demons internally. It always seems to be an element of horror, because it's pretty scary to have to face yourself and the things you're most worried about: your own abilities and your own capabilities and your own level of competence in being a hero.

I love what Brian Azzarello did with Wonder Woman.

When I get the possibility of using a character like Bruce Wayne or Dick Grayson, I try and think about what's most exciting or interesting about them as a person, so I try and think what they are at their core, or what piece of their psychology do I gravitate toward that I respect, and I'm excited by it when I read books about them.

People at Marvel and DC, we're rooting for each other. And when we're friends, like me and Jeff Lemire, or Charles Soule, or even Dan Slott - it doesn't matter if you're Marvel or DC. You'll talk story with each other, and there's like an agreement that you're just helping each other out.

The fun of superhero comics is finding ways to turn the pieces that you know so that they're suddenly about things that you want them to be about, as long as they're true to the core and true to the DNA of the mythology.

You have a book like 'The Shining,' where the hotel is scary - but scarier because it's the haunted house of Jack Torrance's heart.

First of all, what made him [Duke in "Zero Year"] captivating is this sense of somebody who wants to save the city regardless of whether Batman wants to or not, but has been inspired by Batman. He's always been - not combative with Batman or anything - but I think he has a sense that what Robin is and what heroism is in Gotham is something that's inspired by Batman and sort of separate from Batman.

A post-9/11, modern take being Batman training people to be the heroes they know they can be on their own.

If I know what something's about, and I can always have that touchstone, I feel like I can reach for really ridiculous humor and also go really dark in terms of the things I'm afraid of.

Batman is the one you go to for answers and Clark Kent is the one you go to to really do the right thing. He stands as a shining example of what to do in any situation.

"The Cursed Wheel," which Declan [Shalvey] is starting here, is the one constant. It's a story in the backups that will go through the whole year and be the one consistent narrative. It anchors the entire [book].

I read THE WICKED + THE DIVINE last night, and no matter how high your expectations are for it, its better.

Duke is a character who believes that heroism and the Robin mantle can exist entirely separate from Batman himself.

The thing with Superman is that he's completely emotionally open to the reader. Meaning what he tells you is what he's feeling; there's a transparency there. And what he tells other characters is usually as transparent as can be. What he says he believes in. So there's an honesty that is both really inspiring writing the character. One thing I love about Clark Kent is that there is a badassery that you don't see a lot. Even as Superman, he's always kind of restraining himself. When you challenge him, I think there's nobody that has a stronger spine than Superman.

Sometimes, all it takes is a few words to change your life.

Vampires as creatures have evolved over time as different vampire bloodlines have hit different populations of humans. Every once in a while the blood will make something new and mutate into a new species with different powers, abilities, weakness, physical characteristics, and so on. I don't want to give anything away, but there are whole species and branches that date all the way back to pre-modern times.

I spoke to Geoff Johns a lot. We went back and forth, and found a way to bring up the best qualities in his personality and psychology and also fill a niche in Gotham that we've never seen. It became about is there a way to really plant this hero in Gotham and say this is someone you haven't seen before - both in terms of who they are as a person and who they are as a hero.

[Duke] is the same way that Harper Row is a character who doesn't want to know who you are beneath the mask, and that makes her interesting. She'll show up and help Batman, but she never wants to know if he's Bruce Wayne.

Having that North Star for every story [about Batman] is really key for me. It allows me to go farther and farther off the reservation.

I think thing that makes Batman so endlessly interesting is that he's one of the most flawed and deeply human characters, even though he seems completely the most inhuman and infallible in costume. Psychologically he's one of the most complicated in both his strengths and his weaknesses. For me, one of his great strengths and weaknesses is that confidence. His emotional self-protection is one of the things that makes him heroic and sacrificing; he doesn't have a personal life. He sacrifices those to be the best hero he can be.

Beware The Court of Owls, that watches all the time, ruling Gotham from a shadowed perch, behind granite and lime. They watch you at your hearth, they watch you in your bed speak not a whispered word of them or they'll send the Talon for your head.

This one's like that because it's about these things that I think weigh heavily on me in terms of my own failings and the things that I worry about and my personal demons. Is the sum of my personal demons greater than the things that I like about myself? Is this moment - because it's a particulary high tension, scary moment for all of us in terms of the global climate - going to bring out the best or the worst in us?

- If I tell you, will you let met go? - You bet, partner. [...] - You promised! - Nope. I said "you bet." You did ... and you lost.

"The Cursed Wheel" is the heart of the whole year on All-Star. All-Star is a series that's largely compartmentalized so that every artist can reinvent a villain and have Batman go up against the villain in a way that's pretty singular.

Jordie Bellaire knows how to tell a story with color.

What I'm interested in exploring with Clark Kent is when you have the power to do something that goes beyond what you think is the right thing to do and the difficulty of that. Meaning, to be Superman also means to withhold a lot of power. He could reshape the world however he thinks it should be. But Superman doesn't, historically, do those things. He allows a certain level of self-governing and a certain level of independence, I think out of an admiration for humanity. Because he's inspired by the best in us and he challenges us to inspire each other to be the best that we can be.

Does it matter how long they were together that night? To lovers, an hour can last a century. But even for lovers, every hour ends.

I love The End of the Batman story. I have my original copy, the hardcover, at my house from when I was a kid, whenever that was,'88 or '89. It was very influential to me because it was so explicit in touching on the notion that Batman might be mad and that he might belong in the mad house.

With this particular series [The Cursed Wheel] I'm going farther in that direction than I've tried before in terms of the elasticity of the mythology.

On this global stage, Superman is someone that we can all look up to and he's almost kind of ultimately American.

I got fascinated by the idea that our universe itself is comprised mostly of dark matter and dark energy. Things that we can't perceive at all, and we've only discovered that relatively recently. So it's almost as if our universe is the foam on the ocean of things that we can't see, or know, or perceive, and yet we feel the affects of those things right and left.

I was on Batman with "Superheavy" or "Zero Year" where there was a lot of fun and bombast, but it was also personal. [In All-Star], I wanted to take that to its complete extreme, like the end of the Earth extreme, where it's over-the-top humorous, yet at the same time really deeply about what I think is of this particular moment in time, at least for me. The things I'm terrified of and the things I'm hopeful about. My life is the page.

One of the things that's great is that Batman is a character that lends himself to very personal stories.

You take the thing that is the worst thing that could have happened to you, the worst challenge in your life, and you turn it into fuel. You don't give up. And that's what Gotham is about.

I had to fight for wingdings. Batman needs to curse sometimes!

What Batman is saying is that, "I want to try something new that's more about this era and this moment." And I do think that it speaks to a modern take [as opposed] to a 90s take or a 2000s take being maybe the older program about having a sidekick.

KGBeast starts chasing our heroes in a big way, and you get the return of an old character from the mythology that I think people will be really excited to see.