I grew up on the crime stuff. Spillane, Chandler, Jim Thompson, and noir movies like Fuller, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang. When I first showed up in New York to write comics back in the late 1970s, I came with a bunch of crime stories but everybody just wanted men in tights.

I can tell you squat about Islam. I don’t know anything about it. But I know a goddamn lot about al Qaeda and I want them all to burn in hell.

"Comic book" has come to mean a specific genre, not a story form, in people's minds. So someone will call Die Hard "a comic-book movie," when it has nothing to do with comic books. I'd rather have comics be the vehicle by which stories are told.

Working with the kind of talent that I've gotten to work with, like the cast of Sin City, it makes me think probably more fully dimensionally about what is going on behind their eyes. But I draw the way I draw, and ain't nothing gonna change that. Although, I draw Marv and I think, "Boy, I could throw a little Mickey [Rourke] in there."

The American conscience died with the Kennedys.

I don't own an ounce of the work I've ever done on 'Batman,' and I still work on 'Batman.' I love the character, I think it's a lot of fun, and it's kind of fun to be in that ballpark every once in a while, where you're seeing a different crowd.

The rain on my chest is a baptism - I'm born again.