I never thought that Spider-Man would become the world wide icon that he is. I just hoped the books would sell and I'd keep my job.

I think almost everybody enjoyed fairy tales when they were young, tales of witches and ogres and monsters and dragons and so forth. You get a little bit older, you can't read fairy tales any more.

We have enough to do just trying to make our company what we want it to be. As far as whether I would like to own Marvel, sure, I'd like to own Marvel.

I am always nostalgic being in New York. Every neighborhood represents something to me. I lived here until I was 60 years old or so. So it was my life.

Everything has changed and we're all living in one city now. What happens somewhere affects things everywhere, so I have to be careful and whatever stories I work on, I want them to have redeeming moral values.

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.

You can't kill a good comic book series.