I'm the king of the 20th century. I'm the boogeyman, the villian, the black sheep of the family.

My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres; it’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky.

Please! Don't all leave. Somebody has to do it, don't you see? Somebody has to save the world.

I enjoy putting my mind into different situations rather than my body.

It has occurred to me that the superhero really only originates in America. That seems to be the only country that has produced this phenomenon.

Art makes us feel less alone. It makes us think: somebody else has thought this, somebody else has had these feelings.

I'm very pessimistic about adaptations from one medium to another. I've got a very kind of primitive, Puritan view of it. I tend to think that if something was derived for one medium, then there's no real immediate reason to think that it's necessarily going to be as good or better if adapted into another one. There have been very good stage plays that have made some very good films. But there are not so many differences between the theater and the cinema as there are between the cinema and, say, reading a book or reading a comic.