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

Because it's in and about New York City, I knew 'Ex Machina' was going to have to continually mix the mundane and the fantastic.

I've always thought of fantasy as a genre of best-case scenarios, and horror as a genre of worst-case scenarios.

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.

I realized that for fantasy and science fiction, especially from my youth, white was the default. Luke Skywalker was in the lead, or even if you were a hobbit, you're going to be white. That was an extremely old-fashioned, obviously really narrow-minded way to look at things.

Comics are essentially films with fewer frames per second.

I love that the book [Paper Girls ] gets to kind of evolve and change in each era. Our third storyline is our best so far.