Frank Miller Quotes

She doesn't quite chop his head off. She makes a Pez dispenser out of him.

The noir hero is a knight in blood caked armor. He's dirty and he does his best to deny the fact that he's a hero the whole time.

A man without hope is a man without fear.

Gotham City. Clean shafts of concrete and snowy rooftops. The work of men who died generations ago. From here, it looks like an achievement. From here, you can't see the enemy.

Sometimes the solitary voice can be the best one.

News objectivity is a twentieth-century myth. We only complain about propaganda when we don't agree with it.

You can't have virtue without sin. What I'm after is having my characters' virtues defined by how they operate in a very sinful environment. That's how you test people.

It's not movies and it's not "fine art." The beauty of a comic is that it's clear, direct communication. My work is getting simpler and more cartoony because I'm much more interested in communication now than in any illustrative value.

When you got a condition, it's bad to forget your medicine.

Superman punched out Hitler. So did Captain America. That's one of the things they're there for.

'Cartoonists' dirty secret is that we tend to come up with stories that involve things that are really fun to draw.

The fundament of a superhero is the guy in tights saving innocent people from bad things. It's amazing how infrequently that seems to happen in superhero comics these days.

What's happened with computer technology is perfectly timed for someone with my set of skills. I tell stories with pictures. What I love about CGI is that if I can think it, it can be put on the screen.

In the world of comic books, "troublemaker" means someone who has some sense of dignity.

People are attempting to bring a superficial reality to superheroes which is rather stupid. They work best as the flamboyant fantasies they are. I mean, these are characters that are broad and big. I don't need to see sweat patches under Superman's arms. I want to see him fly.

The day you write to please everyone you no longer are in journalism. You are in show business.

3,000 of my neighbors were murdered. My country was, utterly unprovoked, savagely attacked. I wish all those responsible for the atrocity of 9/11 to burn in Hell.

The world doesn't make sense until you force it to.

Mighty cultures never - are almost never conquered. They crumble from within. And frankly, I think that a lot of Americans are acting like spoiled brats because everything that isn't working out perfectly every time.

A screenwriter is much like being a fire hydrant with a bunch of dogs lined up around it.

I grew up on the crime stuff. Spillane, Chandler, Jim Thompson, and noir movies like Fuller, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang. When I first showed up in New York to write comics back in the late 1970s, I came with a bunch of crime stories but everybody just wanted men in tights.

I'm a comic book artist. So I think to myself, what do I like to draw? I like to draw hot chicks, fast cars and cool guys in trench coat. So that's what I write about.

An old man dies. A young woman lives. A fair trade.

I moved to New York and was told, "Go back home. We don't need you. Go pump gas. You're from Vermont. We've got no use for you. You're not drawing guys in tights." So, I learned how to draw guys in tights, and I put them in as many crime situations as I could.

When you have a brush in your hand, inking a beautiful woman is a lot like running your hands over her.

Hell's waking up every goddamn day and not even knowing why you're here.

Ladies. Gentlemen. You have eaten well. You've eaten Gotham's wealth. Its spirit. Your feast is nearly over. From this moment on...none of you are safe.

I'm a spoilt brat. I thought I was just going to walk in and make movies. But I'd been my own boss for so long that all of a sudden to be facing a roomful of people who were niggling over every little scene... I just thought I'd go back and draw my comics and have a happy life.

Think of me as the weathered sheriff coming back into Dodge 'cause the youngsters are shooting up the church and scaring the horses and not doing right by the women.

What I want to bring back to superheroes with this project is a sense of play. Things have gotten so dreary. The heroes have gotten so ugly that even their muscles have muscles.

I check the list. Rubber tubing, gas, saw, gloves, cuffs, razor wire, hatchet, Gladys, and my mitts.

I was always into noir. When I lived in Vermont I was drawing stuff that looked like an amateur doing 'Sin City'. When I first got to New York I was swiftly informed that they only did guys in tights.

In the comic-book world, there tends to be an overblown sense of tradition. Bad habits die hard. There are ways I think the form could work more effectively if we lost the bad habits that were created before we were born.

The larger-than-life thing is definitely what I'm after. I've always drawn dark stories. Occasionally, I'll try a perfect hero, but it's a real stretch for me. I like 'em warts and all, and obsessive and weird.

I think most things I read on the Internet and in newspapers are propaganda. Everyone from the 'New York Times' to Rupert Murdoch has a point of view and is putting forth their own propaganda. They're stuck with the facts as they are, but the way they interpret and frame them is wildly different.

The most questionable thing I did was make Superman a government agent. If this had been a Superman story, I'd never have done that - and I know that, because I have a Superman story I want to tell someday. In this story, Batman was the hero, so the world was built around him.

The Dark Knight series is all from Batman's point of view. But if you look at Dark Knight 2, you'll see a Superman who's much calmer than the one in the first Dark Knight. Batman and Superman are dead opposites. I love Superman. Do I love Batman more? They're not people. They're only lines on paper.

In a way, 'Sin City''s designed to be paced somewhere between an American comic book and Japanese manga. Working in black and white, I realized that the eye is less patient, and you have to make your point, and sometimes repeat it. Slowing things down is harder in black and white, because there isn't as much for the eye to enjoy.

Hello, I'm Shellie's new boyfriend and I'm out of my mind. If you so much as talk to her or even think her name, I'll cut you in ways that'll make you useless to a woman.

Deadly little Miho. She won't let you feel a thing unless she wants you to. She twists the blade. He feels it.

The comics I read as a kid were all about guys in tights. But here was a guy who wore a fedora. He fought crime like they did in Marvel and DC, but he did it in the real world. I had just turned 12 when I met the Spirit and it was a strange coincidence. At the same time I discovered girls I fell out of love with guys in tights.

I don't do a comic book thinking there is a movie. I just want it to be as good a comic book as it can be.

You can never escape me. Bullets don't harm me. Nothing harms me. But I know pain. I KNOW pain. Sometimes I share it. With someone like you.

My feeling is that the hero has now been defined by phrases like the odious one that we were all raised with - crimes does not pay. Of course it pays, you schmuck. That's not why we don't do it. We don't do it because it is wrong.

As a cartoonist, I'm a caricaturist. First you find out what somebody really looks like, and then you find out what they 'really' look like.

A gun is a liar's weapon

I find that if somebody is writing and drawing a comic book, planning it to be a movie and a game at the same time tends to lead to a pretty lame job.

We live in the shadow of crime with the unspoken understanding that we are victims.. of fear, of violence, of social impotence. A man has risen to show us that the power is, ans always has been, in our hands. We are under siege. He's showing us that we can resist.

I realized that I was about to turn 30, and Batman was permanently 29. And I was going to be damned if I was older than Batman.

Working with the kind of talent that I've gotten to work with, like the cast of Sin City, it makes me think probably more fully dimensionally about what is going on behind their eyes. But I draw the way I draw, and ain't nothing gonna change that. Although, I draw Marv and I think, "Boy, I could throw a little Mickey [Rourke] in there."