Top 55 Chris Claremont Quotes

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.

When you’re spending $100-plus million dollars, you need to give the audience what they want.

My desire as a storyteller is to always catch the readers off guard; to give them something they aren’t expecting, and take them in a direction that is satisfying in the here and non.

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

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

I’m an immigrant.

One of the virtues of ‘The X-Men’ was that it managed to transcend the expectations and prejudices of the medium. It appealed to a vaster audience than anyone had ever anticipated from any superhero book, much less ‘X-Men.’

I get to watch stories I wrote brought to life by the most brilliant actors in cinema.

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.

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.

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

When I was little, I used to have nightmares about Godzilla walking out of the Great South Bay, because we had a fire alarm out where we lived that sounded just like his feet.

I was not creating icons when I wrote the ‘The X-Men’ and the ‘The New Mutants.’ I was creating people.

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!

The success of ‘X-Men’ paved the way, I have to presume, for Sony to make Sam Raimi’s ‘Spider-Man.’

What you want to do in a film is encapsulate the characters and the stories into one focused, coherent two-hour time block, and that’s sometimes hard to do especially when you have a group as varied and distinctive as the ‘X-Men’ are.

What I love about Hugh Jackman is he just brings all the elements of my vision of Logan. The pain, the nobility, the duality of his existence.

I never talk about work in progress because once I talk about it I don’t do it anymore.

I think there’s a yin and a yang to everything.

No matter how good of a ball player you were, you can’t keep going forever. You’re not going to be able to hit .300 when you’re 60. You still look around and you think, ‘This is weird. Have I missed something?’ Well, yeah, you have.

But the key thing was that I knew of no other contrast between Wolverine as we understood him and Logan than you see in his behavior as a roughneck Canadian versus classical samurai society. That’s the dichotomy in his soul.

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

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.

It is very hard for me to think of Logan without thinking of Hugh Jackman and I have no idea who out there could take over from him if they moved ahead. It’s like thinking of anyone other than Harrison Ford playing Han Solo or Indiana Jones.

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

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.

For me, writing the ‘X-Men’ was easy – is easy. I know these people, they’re my friends.

Every writer with half a brain knows to surround himself or herself with editors who are smarter, far more articulate, and infinitely better looking.

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.

The more stories I told, the more I found I wanted to tell. There was always something left unsaid. I got hooked by my own impulse of ‘Well, what’s gonna happen next?’

There’s some good films, there’s some films that could be improved. So we keep trying until we get it right. That’s the nature of storytelling, whether it’s on paper or on film.

One of the fun things in the old days about writing with Frank Miller was that every issue of ‘Daredevil’ was a challenge to every issue of ‘X-Men.’

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.

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.

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 would like to do a story where the country found itself a presidential candidate who actually will get elected preaching traditional values and then sets out to enforce them, where it actually comes down to the fact that reality as we know it may not be as etched in stone as we tell ourselves it is.

I think it would be cool if Hugh Jackman showed up in ‘Avengers: Infinity War,’ even if just for a tryout.

You know, for a normal kid it might be how to ask somebody out on a date or how to deal with the SATs or just how to deal with the bully down the block. And the X-Men have the conflict of Magneto or aliens or what-have-you.

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 find now I’m reading a lot more nonfiction, simply because every time I read fiction, I think I can write it better. But every time I read nonfiction, I learn things.

I guess you go back to the old writer’s adage that when they do your stuff in Hollywood, you smile sweetly upon your credit – if there is one – and enjoy the show.

My problem with both iterations of ‘Dark Phoenix’ onscreen, the original by Brett Ratner and the newer version by Simon Kinberg, is, I don’t think you can do it effectively in 90 minutes.

The nice thing about genetics is, I can see my kids doing what I used to do, which is inhaling books like breathing.

In L.A., you have to drive; in New York, you can do it on foot. The variety, the potential, of people is in your face. Like any good creator, you want to steal everything.

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.

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.