- I've never done anything half-heartedly; it's a disservice to me and the audience if I do it half-heartedly
- If you look at my characters, you will find me. No matter what kind of character you create or assume, a little of yourself must remain there.
- My stories are very sincere, my stories are people's stories, and there's elements of my stories that are very very real, and it doesn't matter what the subject is.
- I haven't got the trappings of a circus, but there in my mind is a very active and bright and colorful place, that is as good as any circus that i have ever seen. And i live with that, and i enjoy it immensely.
- [when drawing] I could see the entire picture in my mind and it was very very real.
- The Fantastic Four was my admiration for young people.
- The heroes represent the wholesome part of society. Society has a wholesome side and it has a downside. We know where those facets lie. They are common to all of us.
- We all have a kind of feeling, i think, that we've had for thousands of years, that there are higher beings somewhere. And i think all our spiritual feelings stem from that.
- I think the greatest contribution i made to comics, is the fact that I helped to build up readership.
- [on the question if he was writing comics for children] That was not true at all. I was writing for everybody.
- There are Dr. Doom's and Hulk's in all of us.
- I found a way to help the war effort by portraying the times in the form of comic characters. I was saying what was on my mind. I was extremely patriotic.
- People think about war like they think about comics or think about Broadway plays. They don't think that it's serious, that it is reality. But it is. You gotta kill that guy.
- I'll put on a show. When i draw, that's what i'm doing, i'm performing, i'm not drawing.
- [on what his characters represent] The characters represent sort of a transcendent feeling that we all have inside us. That we could to do better. That we want to do better. We haven't time to do better. We can be the people that we lionize.
- I am a guy who lives with a lot of questions. I say what's out there ? And i try to resolve that. And I never can.
- [talking about his time growing up on the Lower East Side around gangsters] I respected girls. Around my block you had to. You could be a gangster, but if you didn't respect somebody's mother or somebody's sister, they'd beat the heck out of you.
- My job was selling comic books.
- Everybody can draw...all you have to do, is you have to want to.
- Yes, I inked a little, but I was too busy making up the stories.
- [talking about the 1960's] Those were bad times for comics. EC (Entertainment Comics) who folded up. DC was having a hard time. And the day I came up to Marvel, they were closing down the comics.
- [on how technology is changing the industry] We had technology too, we called them pencils.
- I try to make my characters human. Whether we consider them evil, or whether we consider them good. Even my heroes have human qualities. My superheroes have human qualities.
- I've always respected the reader.
- [on the question of how many characters he has created] It would probably come to an army division.
- I come from a storytelling family.
- [his opinion on Darkseid] The most evil character ever created. He was the epitome of all evil.
- [on Captain America] I don't think Captain America would do anything wrong. He wouldn't. Even at the cost of his life.
- I never kill off anybody. My characters never die.
- I wrote my own stories. Nobody ever wrote a story for me. I told in every story what was really inside my gut, and it came out that way.
- Galactus was God, and I was looking for God. When I first came up with Galactus, I was very awed by him. I didn't know what to do with the character. Everybody talks about God, but what the heck does he look like? Well, he's supposed to be awesome, and Galactus is awesome to me.
- I know I've done quite a bit. I know that in my hunger for making a living, I might have created a few monsters. Maybe that's natural. I don't know. But I can tell you that Marvel was my making, and I can tell you that DC never lost anything from any of my work.
- [asked on why he thinks his artwork is very popular] My artwork is popular because it connects with the ordinary person.
- My characters relationship with the reader, is my own relationship. I love people in general, and that's reflected in my characters. My characters are very human, and the next guy recognizes himself in any character I draw.
- I never had stock endings. I didn't believe in stock endings. To make the reader happy was not my objective, but to make the reader say, "Yeah, that's what would happen" - that was my objective. I knew the reader was never happy all the time. You take the Thing, he'd knock out 50 guys at a time and win - then maybe he'd sit down and kind of reflect on it: "Maybe I hurt somebody or maybe we could have done it some other way" like a human being would think, not like a monster.
- [on Steve Ditko] He's kind of a shy fellow. He's very likable and very intelligent, and I'm a real admirer of his work. He's a very creative man. Actually Steve created Spider-man.
- [on Joe Simon] Joe was a competent writer, a competent artist and a very good letterer. He was one up on me.
- [on comics] They've become universal. The comic book was born in America. That's why comics are important, because they're legitimate storytelling.
- [on the question if he created Sgt. Fury] Yes. He was my idea of a soldier. Having been a soldier myself - just a PFC, really - the experiences were very, very real, and whatever was real to me was so reflected in Sgt. Fury. That's the way things were in the War. It's that kind of a thing that galvanized me because - well, it happened, and I was right in the middle of it.
- For comics to be effective they have to mirror life in some way. You've got to make them high drama. You gotta make them - not fictional, but you've got to dramatize, like what you see in Captain America.
- I saw my villains not as villains. I knew villains had to come from somewhere and they came from people. My villains were people that developed problems.
- [more on comics] I think there's something about comics and good storytelling that's a marriage, and they (the fans) realize that. That's the wonderful thing about comics: It puts the idea of published storytelling in the hands of the ordinary guy. That's American.
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