Kurt Busiek Quotes

#1. When you have a novel set in a fictional history, you still should get your history right.

Kurt Busiek

#2. The reason I quit being a sales manager over twenty years now is because I hate elevator pitches. I want to write stories and show people what's in them when they read them, not tell them all about it ahead of time.

Kurt Busiek

#3. Between 'Avengers,' 'JLA/Avengers,' and 'Trinity,' I've gotten down and dirty in the big universes and had a hell of a time playing in those sandboxes.

Kurt Busiek

#4. I love creator-owned comics. Most of my favorite books these days are creator-owned, from stuff DC publishes, like 'Fables,' to books like 'Saga,' 'Fatale,' 'Hellboy,' and 'Courtney Crumrin.'

Kurt Busiek

#5. Maybe I had a 'secret identity,' but then when you think about it, don't we all? A part of ourselves very few people ever get to see. The part we think of as 'me.' The part that deals with the big stuff. Makes the real choices. The part everything else is a reflection of.

Kurt Busiek

#6. I wanted to be a writer, but the idea of writing novels or movies seemed really intimidating. I never got more than a few pages into one.

Kurt Busiek

#7. Theme is great for people who like to approach stories that way, but it's an organizing principle that helps us write a story that has some weight; it's not something that all readers have to care about.

Kurt Busiek

#8. And I saw in them a hope...A hope that it was possible to have secrets, to mask one's true nature...and yet still to walk among men.

Kurt Busiek

#9. You've got to leave the reader with more than just a name and a costume - they need to know who the character is, what they're like, what kind of attitude they have, what sort of role they play.

Kurt Busiek

#10. I tend to think that the best face of humanity is that we learn. We explore, we study, we think.

Kurt Busiek

#11. I like superheroes. I like the drama of it, the stirring, larger-than-life aspect.

Kurt Busiek

#12. What really matters is not how well a character fits a definition, but how strongly he or she resonates. Characters with strong, resonant ideas at their core will have more of an impact on the cultural consciousness than a character who's just an empty collection of attributes.

Kurt Busiek

#13. Dracula, if he could see modern corporations, wouldn't like them much. He took care of his people, at least as he saw it. They had very little freedom, but they had a protector.

Kurt Busiek

#14. Mainly, what I like to do is keep things varied and not get in a rut, not tell the same stories over and over.

Kurt Busiek

#15. I don't view Twitter as a promotional tool but as a really, really, really cool cocktail party.

Kurt Busiek

#16. That's the way it happens - some characters you set out to use, some are happy accidents. As long as it works, it doesn't really matter how you got them.

Kurt Busiek

#17. And is that why we do what we do? For public approval, for fame? Do we help people because they will be appropriately grateful--or merely because they need help?

Kurt Busiek

#18. At one point, I worked up a list of five requirements for a superhero: superpowers, a costume, a code name, a mission, and a milieu. If the character had three out of the five, they were a superhero. But that's just my definition.

Kurt Busiek

#19. He was saving innocents and serving truth. And in the final judgement, what is more important? The burdens we bear -- or the way we bear them?

Kurt Busiek

#20. Marvel's got a crowded universe, and there are already so many characters hogging the spotlight that it's hard to break through that. First off, whatever character you're creating, odds are, there's already someone similar in one way or another.

Kurt Busiek

#21. I wrote 'Marvels,' which was about a guy who had two daughters, and I wrote 'Astro City Volume 2 #1,' which was about a guy who had two daughters. In both cases, about a year and a half or two years apart. And then after that, I had two daughters, about a year and a half or two years apart.

Kurt Busiek

#22. I created lots of characters in high school and college, and the first character I created in pro comics was Liana, Green Lantern of M'Elu, for a backup story in 'Green Lantern #162,' my first professional sale.

Kurt Busiek