Quotes from Christopher Priest

I'm a little insane, and I'm going to be a little different. But hopefully, somewhere in there, in that creative arena, something will emerge that is new and different and unique.

I quit comics in 1988 and trained as a bus driver. I used to drive those big Greyhound coaches out of New York Port Authority and down to Princeton, New Jersey. It was, hands down, the best job I ever had, and I profoundly regret having left it. I kept that job the entire time I was on staff at DC Comics in the '90s.

I was trained in storytelling by Jim Shooter, Stan Lee, and Larry Hama. Doesn't make me a genius, and there really isn't anything fancy about the stage direction in my scripts.

Hollywood is, of course, loaded with egos, but it's amazing to see how, despite the egos, those collaborators pull together and focus on telling a story rather than butt heads and sabotage what is extremely hard work and investment just because their ego apparently demands it.

All people - white, black, whatever - are tribal in the sense that we relate to that which is familiar to us.

We - America - have to move past the ideology, the tribalism, that grips this country. As ridiculous as this sounds, I believe 'Black Panther,' the film, could help us do that if it addresses issues of tribal polarization and, by extension, racism, xenophobia, and homophobia in an entertaining, non-preachy way.

Not liking me because I'm black is so juvenile and immature, because there's many reasons to not like me.

I wanted to demonstrate that Deathstroke does not need to solve every problem with his fists.

I'm like an actor who obnoxiously says he doesn't watch his own TV show. It is extremely rare for me to read my own comics and have asked publishers to please stop sending them to me.

At some point along the way, I stopped being a writer, and I became a black writer. I never used to be a black writer. I used to write 'Spider-Man,' 'Green Lantern,' whatever was lying around. 'Thor,' 'Hulk,' whatever. Now, if the phone rings or when the phone rings, it's almost exclusively some project that has something to do with my ethnicity.

words are only as valid as the mind that chooses them, so that of essence all prose is a form of deception.

Life could only be lived to the full by the instinctive or unconscious denial of death, otherwise nothing would ever be achieved

Living is not an art, but to write of life is. Life is a series of accidents and anticlimaxes, misremembered and misunderstood, with lessons only dimly learned. Life is disorganized, lacks shape, lacks story.

I'm old enough to remember seeing James Brown live.

The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you're looking for the secret... but you wont find it, because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled.

10th October 1877 I am in love! Her name is Drusilla MacAvoy. 15th October 1877 Too hasty by far! The MacAvoy woman was not for me. I am planning to kill myself, and if the remainder of these pages are blank anyone who comes across this diary will know I succeeded.

Magicians protect their secrets not because the secrets are large and important, but because they are so small and trivial. The wonderful effects created on stage are often the result of a secret so absurd that the magician would be embarrassed to admit that that was how it was done.

Now you're looking for the secret, but you won't find it, because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled.

None of it is real, though, because reality lies in a different, more evanescent realm. These are only the names of some of the places in the archipelago of dreams. The true reality is the one you perceive around you, or that which you are fortunate enough to imagine for yourself.

In the expression of grief lies recovery from grief itself.

an incomplete listing of anything reveals that a selection has been made, and any act of selection is of course political.

I had imagined myself into existence. I wrote because of an inner need,and that need was to create a clearer vision of myself, and in writing I became what I wrote.

A good idea is a good idea and my work should compete on its own merits, not based on the size of my fan base.

I had reached the age of six hundred and fifty miles.