I guess one person can make a difference.

Everybody wants to feel that you're writing to a certain demographic because that's good business, but I've never done that ... I tried to write stories that would interest me. I'd say, what would I like to read?... I don't think you can do your best work if you're writing for somebody else, because you never know what that somebody else really thinks or wants.

If I were retired I wouldn't know what to do because I'd have to think, well, now what is it I want to do? And what I want to do is what I'm doing. I enjoy coming up with new ideas, which if I'm lucky they might be good ideas. I enjoy seeing them take shape. And I'm having fun doing it. So I wouldn't know why I'd want to retire.

I had been writing comic books for years and I was doing them to please a publisher, who felt that comics are only read by very young children or stupid adults. And therefore, we have to keep the stories very simplistic... And those were all things I hated.

The way I'm doing it is I'm trying to think to myself, "Okay, I have the name Superman, and he's going to be a guy that deserves the name 'Superman.' I'm trying to forget about Krypton, about The Daily Planet what would I do if I was thinking it up?" I can do it any way at all..I can make him an Eskimo midget who's toothless and blind... I can do anything. It's difficult .

When I was a kid, I loved reading Sherlock Holmes. Now, you don't think of him as a superhero, but he was so damn much smarter than anybody else.

I wanted them to be diverse. The whole underlying principle of the X-Men was to try to be an anti-bigotry story to show there's good in every person.