Quotes from Chris Claremont

If at some point Fox decides that the X-Men properties are no longer lucrative I'm sure that they will cut a deal with Disney.

The cool thing about comic books and prose is that if a reader gets confused on page 8, they can backtrack. With films, you sit down in a seat and once the projector starts going you're stuck for the next two hours. There are no do-overs, rewinding or starting again.

My view of Magneto is that he's the terrorist who might someday evolve into a statesman.

It's a fascinating world to drop a finished product on the marketplace without the intercession of a publisher.

Comics publishers are used to looking in a very, very narrow focused prism. It's like when I started writing 'X-Men.' Our 'meat and potatoes' money was made of newsstand sales, while anything that came through the Direct Market was considered gravy.

No creator in modern times is going to stick around with a concept for 20 years. There are simply too many alternatives that writers want to pursue.

When you're an adolescent, you suddenly wake up one morning and your body is an enemy. There are hormonal changes, physical changes, emotional changes. People are saying to you, 'Now you have to make the decisions that define the rest of your life.' The X-Men takes those elements and pushes them one giant step farther.

Maisie Williams was my first choice to play Wolfsbane when I heard about the 'New Mutants' movie - but in comic books, I can keep the New Mutants adolescent for decades and have as much fun writing them at the end as I did in the beginning.

The one thing I have never been comfortable with in the modern presentation of character - and it may have changed, this is some years ago - is their total isolation from the rest of the world. It's all about superheroes interacting with superheroes. There's no normal life. No normal people.

Life is the ultimate adventure, and Death, the prize that awaits us all.

One of the seminal moments I remember as a young punk is, when Roy Thomas was doing an editorial read-through of a book before it went to press, and being so gob-smacked by it, he just canceled it right there.

I find the idea of the recap page to be something of a waste. It's the page nobody ever reads and it's even worse because it doesn't tell you who anybody really is.

For me that's the magic of the printed page - we don't have to pay attention to the passage of time and focus in on the realities of these characters at a specific age or at a specific time in their lives, and we can play with that to our hearts' content.

We figured the audience would want good stories, great art, wonderful characters, people you could fall in love with that we would immediately put through hell.

Like 'Uncanny X-Men,' 'New Excalibur' is the story of people thrown together by fate and wild circumstance who find their way to true and lasting friendship.

The first challenge that every writer or creator of material faces is getting through the crowd so that the person you're trying to sell it to hears the pitch and is able to respond to it.

It seems that most of the projects I'm doing with relationship to Marvel's 80th anniversary occur during my core run on the X-Men titles.

My wife and I have this discussion all the time. Her primal influences are J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald. Mine are Rudyard Kipling, Edith Nesbit and T.H. White. So, we have certain structural differences in form and content right off the bat!

In terms of the 'X-Men: Days of Future Past' movie, Bryan Singer has been a part of the X-Men family from the first movie. He knows about the comics canon and how it relates to his work as a filmmaker. He's more well versed in the canon than most, as are the people that are working with him.

My resonance to Magneto and Xavier was borne more out of the Holocaust. It was coming face to face with evil, and how do you respond to it? In Magneto's case it was violence begets violence. In Xavier's it was the constant attempt to find a better way.

What excites me, what attracts me, what gets me up in the morning is telling the next story and getting it out in front of readers and hoping they'll love it too.

From Captain Britain's point of view we live in a great, heavily populated omniverse and our reality is just one part of that. In each of the parallel worlds there is a lighthouse on every shore of every England where the champion has his base.

The challenge is, in terms of a canon like 'X-Men,' it's more like 'Harry Potter' and Hogwarts, or 'Game of Thrones.' It needs time and space to evolve and to bring the reader or viewer in and give them a result that's worth the investment of that time.

If you're going to create a character, the tools you use to make that character 'real' are the lives you see around you. The people you listen to on the street. The emotions you see on faces and bodies while you're sitting... in a Starbucks, watching the world go by.