STAN LEE QUOTES

American comic book writer & creator (1922- )

• «
• 1
• 2
• 3
• »

With great power there must also come ... great responsibility!

STAN LEE

Tags: power

---

'Nuff Said!

STAN LEE

---

There is only one who is all powerful, and his greatest weapon is love.

STAN LEE

---

I never thought that Spider-Man would become the world wide icon that he is. I just hoped the books would sell and I'd keep my job.

STAN LEE

---

What did Doctor Doom really want? He wanted to rule the world. Now, think about this. You could walk across the street against a traffic light and get a summons for jaywalking, but you could walk up to a police officer and say "I want to rule the world," and there's nothing he can do about it, that is not a crime. Anybody can want to rule the world. So, even though he was the Fantastic Four's greatest menace, in my mind, he was never a criminal!

STAN LEE

---

I don't really see a need to retire as long as I am having fun.

STAN LEE

Tags: retirement

---

Excelsior!

STAN LEE

---

It never occurred to us to save any of those things. We never thought they'd have any value later on. We worked in a very small office, and the printer would send back all the original pages of artwork, but we had no place to put them. So when we ordered food, we told the delivery guy, "Hey, would you mind taking these pages and dropping them in the trash on the way out?"

STAN LEE

---

That's what everybody tells me. "I would've had a great comic-book collection, but my mother made me throw them away." But when I was growing up, my mother didn't care. As long as I was reading, she didn't care if my room was filled with comics. I could have saved everything. I was just too stupid to do it.

STAN LEE

---

I think the most important thing is to be busy, because if you have work occupying you, you don't have time to worry about the other serious problems in life.

STAN LEE

Tags: work

---

I had a publisher who felt comics were just for little kiddies, so he never wanted me to use words of more than two syllables.

STAN LEE

---

Comic book should be written as one word. So from now on, I want you to remember that. I never want to see the word comicbook written as two words. They are not funny books. They are not comic books, they are comicbooks! Remember that, or incur my wrath.

STAN LEE

---

First I gave it to Jack Kirby to do, but Jack always drew these very heroic characters, like Captain America. I said to him, "You know Jack, I want this fellow Peter Parker, I want him to be just an average teenager. Don't let him look like your typical muscular superhero." I guess Jack was so used to drawing those kinds of people, that after he drew a page or two I looked at it and I said, "No, that's not right." So I said, "Forget it Jack. I'll give it to another artist." And Jack didn't care; he had a lot of other things to do, and we didn't realize this was going to become such a big script. So I gave it to Steve Ditko, who tended to draw things a little more realistically and more down to earth. And he did it, and I really don't interfere much in what the costume will look like. Steve pretty much invented the [Spider-Man] costume himself.

STAN LEE

---

I'm thankful for our writers
Whose imaginations never fail,
And I'm thankful for our artists
Who illustrate each tale.
I'm thankful for our letterers
Who print the words we write,
And without our classy colorists
We'd just be black and white.
I'm thankful for our editors
Who put it all together,
And the gang that proofs each peerless page
In every kind of weather.
I'm thankful for our printers
So dependable and true,
And also for our auditors
Whatever it is they do.
I'm thankful for our sales force
Selling every neighborhood,
And I thank our competition
For making us look good.
Now here's to all of Marveldom
I can't thank you enough,
Yep, you're the ones I thank the most
For reading all this stuff!

STAN LEE

---

We're lucky. Most of our men are good story men. In fact, they have to be. A fellow who's a good artist, but isn't good at telling a story in this form ... in continuity form ... can't really work for us.

STAN LEE

---

I've written so many things over the years that I don't want to go back to being just a scriptwriter. I'm in what I consider to be the enviable position of all I have to do is come up with the idea and write an outline that makes it seem like it's a viable idea that will interest people, and then other people write the scripts -- and I become the executive producer or the producer, depending on how much involvement I have, and I get a creative credit and then move on to the next project.

STAN LEE

---

Once, I'd written a Western story, and one of the panels was just a hand holding a six-shooter, and there was a puff of smoke coming out of the barrel, and a straight horizontal line, indicating the trajectory of the bullet. So that page was sent back to me from the Code office, saying that the particular panel was too violent. I asked them what they meant, and they told me--I swear--"The puff of smoke is too big." Well, of course. So I had the artist make the smoke a little smaller, and the youth of America was saved.

STAN LEE

---

I just figured that Bruce Banner had probably been a friend of Reed Richards, and Reed had given him some elastic trousers. There's an explanation for everything, but you may not be technically advanced enough to follow me on all of this.

STAN LEE

---

A superhero's catchphrase should be like a really memorable advertising slogan. It sticks in your head and you can't stop humming it. And let's face it, superheroes are just really selling themselves as products.

STAN LEE

---

DC, of course, is trying to catch up to Marvel. More power to them. It's good if everybody does well, but they're certainly starting from a ways back. They have a lot of catching up to do ... Marvel has so many heroes. DC just has Superman, Batman and maybe Wonder Woman. Perhaps they'll use The Flash. Green Lantern wasn't very successful, but we'll see.

STAN LEE

---

• «
• 1
• 2
• 3
• »