Brian K. Vaughan Quotes

Comics brought me to the dance. It'll always be my first loyalty.

We're always looking roughly 30 years behind us. In the '80s they were obsessed with the '50s and so on.

I think there is a possible future where maybe we do just take a hard turn away from the Internet and we do start valuing our privacy again.

I just want to take a realistic look now, now that we have enough distance.

Immigration confuses and terrifies me, so why not try to write a comic and make some sense of it?

I've never had any interest in retelling stories from my youth.

I grew up with a sister I was very close with and a mom who was a powerful influence on my life. I was always close with women.

Okay, is anyone else worried that some of the fruit didn't fall far enough away from the tree?

Once upon a time, each of us was somebody's kid. Everyone had a father, even if he never provided anything more than his seed. Everyone had a mother, even if she had to leave us on a stranger's doorstep. No matter how we're eventually raised, all of our stories begin the exact same way. They all end the same, too.

I start with something that makes me angry or confused, and then I write about it. It's a form of self-help.

I write the book for one person — for Fiona [Staples, the artist]. I spend a lot of time just thinking how she'll react to things and manipulating her into drawing perverse, horrific things. It's a really weird job but I enjoy it.

I'm really happiest living life 22 pages at a time and putting things in little boxes on pages.

A comic script is basically a love letter from you to your artist.

Yeah, that's right. Flee in terror, bitches!

When I was in college, I was belittling the woman who later become my wife for not knowing who Boba Fett was, and she responded by asking me if I knew who the Prime Minister of Israel was. Surprisingly? Not Mon Mothma.

I grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland in 1988 and there was just one year where suddenly all of the delivery kids that used to be boys were suddenly girls. It happened at our church too. Altar boys were suddenly altar girls. There was just this sense that all these young women knew there were openings here to be the first of their kind.

Brubaker and Phillipss books have always been about eight years ahead of their time.

I am a big theater fan. It's mostly just being pretentious, I think, and trying to look smart.

Happy endings are bullshit. There are only happy pauses.

No. No, first comes boyhood. You get to play with soldiers and spacemen, cowboys and ninjas, pirates and robots. But before you know it, all that comes to an end. And then, Remo Williams, is when the adventure begins.

People just want good stories.

There's a lot of fiction from that period that we're nostalgic for.

Your own creations are your own children; you gave life to them, so you'll always have, if not more passion to them, more connections to them.

Print and digital comics will always coexist.

All writing is the same: It's just making up lies until it starts to sound like the truth. That's what I do.

It's TV shows like 'Buffy' and 'Angel' that usually have an incredible cliffhanger every commercial break that amaze me.

I know I'm a grumpy old man, but I'm always more delighted by readers talking about the actual comics than people talking about how eager they are to have their favorite comics be "elevated" into another medium. Adaptations are great, but for me, comics have always been the destination, not a stepping-stone to get somewhere else.

I genuinely am sort of an emotionally stunted man-child, so if I just write to the top of my intelligence, it sounds like a teenager. I like being around teenagers. It's good for drama; they feel everything much more intensely than adults do, their lives are much more interesting than ours. They're mutants. They have these weird bodies that are rebelling against them and changing every day. Teenagers always equal good drama.

The biggest inspiration for everything I do is, of course, my wife, playwright Ruth McKee.

The longer I've been writing scripts, the more I find that you have to give the artist more leeway or else you'll just be disappointed. You can't force them to draw every image that's in your head. Since I'm a horrific artist, I wouldn't want them to anyway. So I definitely give them a lot more leeway now than I did at the beginning.

I'm just grateful to finally be telling a story with all females at the lead.

I have no imagination; I just steal from life and change the color. Then it's a comic book.

Some people are haunted by their pasts, but not my family. I mean, how can you be haunted by something that never really dies?

To try and imagine that I'm another person is always going to be hard - whether I'm writing about a truck driver or someone who is gay, who's trans, who is of a different ethnicity or creed. But it would be boring if I always had to write about myself and my limited viewpoint.

I, for example, am a pompous asshole, but my comics are genius!

When a man carries an instrument of violence, he'll always find the justification to use it.

I'm still digesting the '90s. It takes some time to get perspective.

I'm the one who started spreading that particular factoid, about Bendis, Azz and me all being bald Brian's from Cleveland, just to get my name mentioned in the same sentence as two much-better writers, and it's worked like a goddamn charm. Next up, I'm going to grow a big, disgusting beard, just so people will start talking about Alan Moore and me in the same breath.

I sort of jumped out of movies and into the lifeboat of comics. I loved it right away. It was the opposite of film school. Whatever was in my imagination could end up in the finished product. There were just no limitations.

What cruel creatures men are. Our bodies tell us to love so many, but there's room in our hearts for so few.

Violence is stupid. Even as a last resort, it only ever begets more of the same.

Gert: Wake me when the fight scene's over. Kitty Pryde: Oy, tell me about it. Hey, I'm Kitty. You the token pacifist of your group? Gert: Not exactly. Pacifists are like vegans, I'm more of a vegetarian. I enjoy fish and occasional maulings.

We describe [Paper Girls] as Stand By Me meets Terminator.It's a story about nostalgia and childhood, but with an action-packed, sci-fi bent.

I'm not afraid of the world. I'm afraid of a world without you.

I don't start a story until I know where it's going to end.

Not a word of my writing has ever been changed by another person's hands, and I don't think many screenwriters can say that.

Life is mostly just learning how to lose.

After ten years of toiling away in Hollywood, I realized that there's no better place for new ideas than comics.