Mark Millar Quotes

The heart is a muscle, and you strengthen muscles by using them. The more I lead with my heart, the stronger it gets.

I think exactly the same qualities as men [women role model needs], exactly the same, which is kindness, courage and intelligence.

It didn't take a trauma to make you wear a mask. It didn't take your parents getting shot...or cosmic rays or a power ring...Just the perfect combination of loneliness and despair.

I think American audiences are quite interesting in that they can handle almost any amount of violence, but the moment the violence becomes sexual violence it immediately becomes an issue.

Even when I was a little boy, when I was seven, I absolutely loved Wonder Woman, and I saw her as one of the superhero greats with Superman and Batman, and I think it's because she was her own thing. She always felt like the real deal the same way that Superman and Batman did. Whereas the She-Hulks and Spider-Women and all that kind of thing felt like a continuation of a concept.

I just love the fact that all my pals are basically looked after. You know, we have these amazing deals, these guys split 50 percent. We have ownership 50 percent, all the bonuses 50 percent, and everybody's going to be alright. So going forward into the future, every one of these Millarworld projects, as we call them, 50 percent partners on everything. So it's just a really happy environment to be working in.

Decision-making is a skill. Wisdom is a leadership trait.

Jesus, man. Why do people want to be Paris Hilton and nobody wants to be Spider-Man?

The weird thing is that Stuart's the one guy - Stuart [Immonen ]and Sean Gordon Murphy, they're the kind of guys you can trust, where you don't need to do that because those guys are so incredibly reliable. They're just like clockwork, they turn in the pages just so perfectly on time. But I'm so paranoid, because I've been burned so many times, that I'm still even banking these guys.

One of the things that made Star Wars work was the kids didn't know who their dad was.

When you expect the best from people, you will often see more in them than they see in themselves.

At the moment, I have it planned as a six or seven year experiment, but the books will only ever appear in bursts like this every couple of years and only with the best quality artists.

I'm honestly as happy writing Superman Adventures as I am writing Wanted.

First, believe in your ability to create the future. That's what leaders do-that is our job. Understand reality but never be imprisoned by it. Reality is a moment in time. The future has not yet been written-it is written by leaders.

I love the fact that they [girls ]are into Superman and Green Lantern and Batman and everything, and they really do have all those toys as well, but I don't want all their role models to be men.

Matthew Vaughn phoned me up and he said, "Hey, listen, the movie has just done gangbusters. We've got to do the second one." And I was like, "Matthew, I have no second book. Dave and I haven't done it," and he's like, "You're kidding!" He said, "This movie's just made $420 million!" I was like, "...We've got nothing." So the amazing thing was, because we own the rights, we still get paid and everything, which is fantastic.

The books are all very, very different so the publishers really had to be different too.

The big thing is it's a domestic drama. Everything else in science fiction tends to be high-concept. Really for the last 40 years or so I think sci-fi's been a little cold and a little inhuman quite often - certainly since the 1980s - and I really wanted to do something that almost felt like a regular, real-life drama but just set it in a sci-fi setting. I think the best stuff is always like that.

If you feel the need to make everyone happy, you should be a wedding planner not a leader.

Would you rather see a super soldier battling Nazis or something more serious? Or lesbians down a coal mine? Generally, the films are engaging in the same way as the comics are. It's no coincidence that the biggest movies are genre-related, whether it's Lord of the Rings or comic books.

The highest form of leadership is one in which a leader raises up other leaders - not as an accident, but as a result of conscious effort.

If you want to build a high performance organization, you've got to play chess, not checkers.

What I do with everything is take things out of real life. You encounter all sorts of stories. It's a lot of your friends and family, sometimes there's quite sad episodes in their life and everything. So just little things I've picked up along the years always find a way into all of my stories.

The breadth of the potential readership is also a factor.

You can lead with or without a title. If you wait until you get a title, you may wait forever.

She was like John Rambo meets Polly Pocket; Dakota Fanning crossed with Death Wish 4.

I don't know, maybe it's just timely, or maybe it's the fact that I live in a house with four women, but I just find my thoughts kind of skewing that direction at the moment.

In the U.S., Superman or Batman or something, the law-enforcement people, are the most famous comic characters. Americans have a respect, I think, for badges and a respect for uniforms. I think that's, in some ways, quite a nice thing, but it can be dangerous, too, because it can obviously be abused.

I'm just running through this list of potential nannies and wondered if we should go for a superhero this time. Do you think Wolverine would be interested? He seems to be on every other team right now.

The lovely thing is, if Marvel had a Spider-Man movie over at Sony or something, they own the rights to the character, and the editors and producers make suggestions and get notes and things. But you're talking about Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman. They're two of the best people in the world. The notes are just things like, "This is absolutely brilliant."

I just noticed I've been writing lots of female-led things. Two of them haven't been announced yet, but the big Greg Capullo book I'm doing is a female-led story, and I'm doing another series with John Romita which is a female-led story as well.

The glass is always completely full-half air and half liquid.

Others control our opportunities, we control our readiness.

I'm very lucky that I have this other career that runs alongside my comic career, which is a film career, and I've been given this really lovely setup where they seem to make the movies very quickly as well.

Pretty much all comic-book people, like all Hollywood people, for the most part, are pretty liberal. I think especially UK writers. Alan Moore is probably the most radical guy you'll ever meet. I grew up loving those guys, so my heroes, as a kid, were radical cartoonists, essentially. I couldn't help but - I grew up in a left-wing household. But I do think it's fun, writing right-wing characters. I've found it interesting, just as a writer, to get inside their heads and make them likeable.

Leaders don't ever "arrive." If we ever think we're done, we are done!

There's almost a universe as big as the Marvel Universe with X-Men. I mean, Deadpool is something I think everybody was taken surprise by, except for the people who read the comic book.

I don't see one as bring better or more literate than the other and there's a real buzz to not only writing about a character I love like Superman, but also writing something that kids can enjoy.

Marvel books also feed into the smaller publishers and the fact that this is happening in the same month we're launching Ultimate Fantastic Four is no coincidence.