Top 25 Brian K. Vaughan Quotes

I love doing research. I’m a film-school geek.

I like animal sidekicks. They seem to be a pretty cool trope of post-apocalyptic fiction – just because if you’re going to have this lone protagonist, they’re going to need someone to talk to. Dogs are overused, and cats are dumb. So that leaves monkeys.

I never want readers to be comfortable, to feel like we’re in a comedy or a drama. Life is never just one of those things. Life is a balance of all those things.

For a lot of arcane shipping reasons, new comics, even digital ones, have a long history of only being released on Wednesdays.

By the time you have your protagonist attempting to assassinate the Pope, you’ve sort of signaled that everything is on the table.

Even though I was trained in play writing and screenwriting, when I sat down to write a comic book for the first time, Alan Moore was first and foremost in my mind.

Not many people read my stuff, but I really like the ones that do.

It’s cool because I think ‘Ex Machina’ is a little bit under the radar, which is always when I do my best work – when I feel like no one’s paying attention.

I remember when I was a kid and I would go to the comic-book store, I would have no idea what was going on in that month’s issues. Sometimes I wouldn’t even know what comics were coming out until I walked into the store.

There are probably writers who are much more visual than I am and some who are less. I like to think of myself as a happy medium.

I never like to talk about my own politics, but whether you’re left, right or center, the 2008 race was definitely good drama.

I’m totally open to it being a movie or a television series or whatever, but truthfully, if no one wants to do it right, I’m also happy for ‘Ex Machina’ to only ever exist as a comic book.

I think there is a possible future where maybe we do just take a hard turn away from the Internet and we do start valuing our privacy again.

I was only ever part of ‘Lost’ – a very small part of an extremely talented writers’ room, where as a writer, it’s sort of your job to sublimate your ego and work in the service of the show and the show’s voice.

After 9/11, I knew I wanted to write about power and identity and the way Americans on all sides of the political spectrum often mythologize our leaders, which are themes that the superhero genre has always handled really well.

My parents grew up during the space race, and I think they imagined the future would be us living on moon bases and everyone has rocket shoes.

I am a big theater fan. It’s mostly just being pretentious, I think, and trying to look smart.

I love other movies that have been made since, but I think more than any comic book movie, ‘Superman’ just totally seemed to capture superheroes in ways that others have not.

Because it’s in and about New York City, I knew ‘Ex Machina’ was going to have to continually mix the mundane and the fantastic.

Having children changes you forever, as a writer and as a human being. I hope it’s for the better on both counts, but I guess we’ll see.

As much as I’m enjoying stuff out here in Hollywood, I will always think of myself as a comic-book writer who does film and television, not a film and TV writer who occasionally does comics.

I don’t think I have discipline when it comes to anything.

I’ve always seen ‘Y’ as an unconventional romance between a boy and his protector. It was always about the last boy on Earth becoming the last man on Earth, and the women who made that possible.

I never liked working on editorial-driven comics. I just didn’t see what was the point. They don’t pay well enough for me to write other people’s ideas.

I sort of jumped out of movies and into the lifeboat of comics. I loved it right away. It was the opposite of film school. Whatever was in my imagination could end up in the finished product. There were just no limitations.