Quotes from Chris Claremont

My relationship with Marvel is that I work for them.

I'm contractually not allowed to work in comics in the United States other than for Marvel.

A lot of people didn't like the 'Fantastic Four' for the first year and a half. It took a certain measure of time for me to find my feet in terms of what I wanted to do with the concept.

People would much rather argue their own visions and conceptions about a book than engage in a dialogue with the author, because the author could always trump you with, 'I wrote it.'

The key thing if you're a writer is to visualize the scene and convey it to the penciller and turn the penciller loose.

You have an iconic character in Superman. You want to keep him vital and relevant to the audience as it evolves. So there's a creative dynamic.

It never would have occurred to me in 'Days of Future Past' to cast Peter Dinklage as Bolivar Trask, and yet as soon as he got onscreen I couldn't think of anyone else.

I always had a sense of where I was going with 'Dark Phoenix.' Jean had the greatest power imaginable... and, how's she going to deal with that?

I wish the 'Dark Phoenix' saga had been done more effectively than it was, but that was out of my hands.

People try to pigeonhole comics by saying they're just for kids. So is The Odyssey. So is the Labors of Hercules, the story of Fa Mulan. The advantage of those stories over the contemporary ones is that they've had 2,000 years of editing. All the crap has been weeded out over time.

All things are possible, especially in the realm of superheroes.

Superman has always been a battle for hope.

The really nice thing with 'Future Past' is that you actually have a superhero film - much to everyone's surprise, I will hope - that is about something. It's about racism, I hope. It's about resisting oppression. It's about fighting for freedom and the cost of fighting for freedom.

In some films it wouldn't be surprising to see the United States envisioned as a significant but not primary dominant marketplace, and treated accordingly. But in comics, that's for the governing minds at each of the companies and corporations to find out for themselves.

If you think the X-Men are going to be push-overs, think again! Far better men than you have pledged their destruction ... yet the X-Men are still here.

The thing with mutants is, they've always stood in for the disenfranchised and downtrodden. And no matter how hard they fight, how hard they work to live among humans, the humans always push back with new laws and new ways of hurting mutants.

Isn't it amazing how the X-Men always managed to be ahead of everybody's curve no matter how they look at it?

Creative life should be more than preaching to the converted, more than going for a core audience of 100,000 people. It should be taking risks, challenging the readership and having enough faith in one's own talent and craft to take readers on that ride.

The weird thing for me is I'm sitting there in the '80s writing about the Mutant Control Act and here we are in the second decade of the 21st century with the Patriot Act, listening to presidential candidates talk about building walls to keep people out: who's acceptable and who isn't. It's very creepy.

The weirdest, most eloquent memory I have of the time on the kibbutz is, every Saturday night was movie night, and one of the first movies I remember seeing there was 'Judgment at Nuremberg.'

The fundamental thing that makes the 'X-Men' different from every other series out there is it's all about prejudice. It's about a group of young people trying to make a place in a society that doesn't want them.

The wonder, especially about the 'New Mutants' is, they're all kids. They're all growing. They're changing, literally, from page to page in terms of character and approach, past, present, and future. As a writer, that's the most delicious thing to play with.

If one were to go back to the '50s, the most popular TV genre on the air in the United States were Westerns. You could go turn on ABC or CBS on any night and you'd almost have three full hours of everything from 'Bonanza' to 'Rawhide' to 'Wanted Dead or Alive.'

The best moments in comics come from a primal image that captures the emotion and the conflict. What you add are the pieces that get you to the point and what happens next.