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.
Interpretation
Creative expression involves taking risks and challenging audiences beyond the familiar.
Chris Claremont emphasizes that a truly creative life is not just about catering to a comfortable or well-defined audience. Instead, it involves taking bold risks, pushing the boundaries of creativity, and having confidence in one's abilities to engage and inspire a broader range of people.
In practice
In a speech about artistic freedom, one might say, 'As Chris Claremont reminds us, creative life should be more than preaching to the converted.'
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.
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.
The key isn't winning -- or losing, it's making the attempt. I may never be what I ought to be, want to be -- but how will I know unless I try? Sure, it's scary, but what's the alternative? Stagnation - A safer, more terrible form of death. Not of the body, but of the spirit. An animal knows what it is, and accepts it. A man may know what he is -- but he questions. He dreams. He strives. Changes. Grows.
X-Men has always been about finding your place in a society that doesn't want you.
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.
Comics deal with fundamental archetypes. We've been called the myth-makers of the modern age.
Type well used is invisible as type, just as the perfect talking voice is the unnoticed vehicle for the transmission of words, ideas.
In America, at the beginning of talkies, they pulled Fred Astaire from the theaters and put him on the screen and had all of these great composers write songs for him. They call it the Great American Songbook; I call it the Fred Astaire Songbook because they were written for him.
I do not believe in the art which is not the compulsive result of man's urge to open his heart
The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to entertain, to make things up. The art of what I do lies not in research or even recollection but primarily in invention.
I am an artist at living - my work of art is my life.
Design is inherently optimistic. That is its power.
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