G. Willow Wilson Quotes

"Superheroes don't often get their powers in one fell swoop. It's like superhero puberty."

"The 'Islam vs. the West' dialogue ceased to be about real people a long time ago."

"What we wanted to do was tell a story that felt relatable to anyone who's been a teenager. We haven't all been a second-generation Pakistani-American girl with superpowers, but we've all been 16 and awkward."

"I didn't believe in spiritual homelands, and found God as readily in a strip mall as in a mosque."

"I write about real life as it is lived by the young American Muslim women that I've had the pleasure of meeting throughout the course of my travels as a writer and being able to speak in different places and meet different people at signings and things."

"That's something the head scarf, in a symbolic way, is meant to do in Arabic culture: it defines your relationship to your husband and the men of your family differently than your relationship to the average guy on the street you've never met."

"To me, a staircase looks like a series of dark and light horizontal stripes, which is exactly how you'd draw a staircase. So I know how the image is going to look on the page."

"Despite all the criticisms that have been leveled at the comics community, both in terms of fans and creators, I have always felt more comfortable and accepted in the comics community than I have in any other medium of publishing that I've had the pleasure of working in."

"In comics, we're all weird together. I can go to a comics convention and not stand out, even though I'm the only woman in a headscarf there, because the guy next to me has a beard and a Sailor Moon costume."

"Being a Muslim in America, I've noticed that there's a ton of crossover between the Muslim community and geekdom."

"When I need guidance or just to kvetch or to bounce ideas off of people, I go to Gail Simone, who is very much kind of the den mother of all of us who are working comics."

"I was born in New Jersey and lived there until I was about 10, so Jersey is in my roots."

"When you write for a comic series, many superheroes have 60 or some years of history that you are coming into."

"As a writer and a mom, I wish I could split into two or three different people so I could be with my kids all day, write all day, and go out and do the interviews all day. Multiplicity woman!"

"People love to talk about new and different. They don't always love to buy and read new and different."

"I think people, especially in the Muslim community, are rightly cautious any time you hear, 'Oh, there's going to be a Muslim character.'"

"The great thing about Cairo is the vast majority of women wear some kind of head scarf, but they are also very fashion-conscious. They love bright colors."

"I think any time you have a super team, whether it's all men or all women or both, what you have are people with very unique strengths that aren't always totally compatible."

"I think that's a huge theme in superhero books across the board: When you have this massive power, how do you use it responsibly? When do you intervene? Those are the big questions."

"I think all these pop cultural media often reflect conversations we're having in the real world at that moment in time. I think one of the big conversations we're having as a culture is we thought we'd solved sexism and racism, and we're realizing more and more that we haven't."

"I have younger friends who are in this pinch where they feel they've been counted out before they've had a chance to prove themselves. They've inherited a lot of debt - not just student debt but environmental debt, political debt. They really feel squeezed."

"I think comics are really part of The Zeitgeist. They reflect back to us the issues that we're concerned about in the time they are written."

"So many people are of mixed heritage; everyone is from somewhere else."

"I keep setting the bar higher for myself in terms of what I'm trying to accomplish."

"Sometimes, by using the most over-the-top, ridiculous plot device you can imagine, you get some interesting little conflicts and cool things that you might not otherwise have a chance to explore."

"Some languages expand not only your ability to speak to different people but what you're able to think."

"I'm not a programmer myself, but I am a very, very picky end user of technology. I like my machines to work they way they're supposed to, all the time."

"I'm writing in English; I'm writing for a Western audience, but the people I'm surrounded by in my daily life are mostly non-white."

"Americans look at the Middle East as a source of trauma because of 9/11. At the same time, I could see the fear going on in the Middle East as well - which would be the next country to be invaded or sanctioned? Being around those tensions was traumatic for me."

"When we read fiction, we want to get outside of ourselves and are able to see from a perspective we haven't seen through before. That can be very powerful."