I thought it would be fun to take the kind of character that nobody would like, none of our readers would like, and shove him down their throats and make them like him.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the challenge of creating unlikable characters in storytelling to engage the audience.
Stan Lee expresses his artistic intention to create a character that, at first glance, would be perceived as unlikable by readers. Through his storytelling, he aims to challenge and transform readers' perceptions, encouraging them to embrace and relate to complex characters, ultimately deepening their engagement with the narrative.
In practice
During a lecture on character development in creative writing.
To be honest, when I was writing these stories a million years ago, I never thought about movies at all one way or another. It would have seemed almost miraculous for these things to be movies someday. To me, they were just comic books that I hoped would sell so I could keep my job.
I wanted them to be diverse. The whole underlying principle of the X-Men was to try to be an anti-bigotry story to show there's good in every person.
If I'm half as good as everybody said I am, I'm far too good to be wasting time with ordinary people. But I seem to be spending my life with ordinary people, who are the best people in the world.
America is made of different races and different religions, but we're all co-travelers on the spaceship Earth and must respect and help each other along the way.
My mother was the greatest mother in the world. She thought I was the greatest thing on two feet. I'd come home with a little composition I had written at school, and she'd look at it and say, 'It's wonderful! You're another Shakespeare!' I always assumed I could do anything. It really is amazing how much that has to do with your attitude.
For years, kids have been asking me what's the greatest superpower. I always say luck. If you're lucky, everything works. I've been lucky.
When you write a play, you work out like a musician on a piece of music. You find all the rhythms and the melody and the harmonies and take them as they come.
Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.
Whatever your style or subject matter, in the end, film-making is about searching for authenticity - that is what the audience will divine.
Science for me is very close to art. Scientific discovery is an irrational act. It's an intuition which turns out to be reality at the end of it-and I see no difference between a scientist developing a marvellous discovery and an artist making a painting.
Writing is a deep-sea dive. You need hours just to get into it: down, down, down. If you're called back to the surface every couple of minutes by an email, you can't ever get back down. I have a great friend who became a Twitterer and he says he hasn't written anything for a year.
Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.