Marjorie Liu

“I'm really bothered by questions of humanity, questions of war, questions of slavery.”

“To all the young kids of color - and not so young - people who want to use their voices, who are thinking, 'This seems difficult because I don't see myself out there,' I tell you, you must be persistent because we need you. We need you so, so badly.”

“The greatest enemy one ever faces is one's own self.”

“Timing is irrelevant when it comes to desire.”

“I don't think of myself as having any freedom when it comes to how 'Monstress' is structured and how the story is going because a comic book has to be even more tightly structured than a novel, because there is no room for mistakes. Once the art is done, the art is done.”

“I'm a writer and a feminist of color, and I've written complex, powerful women for my entire career. I'm just one voice, but there are many others like me.”

“I could be shooting myself in the foot, but in some ways, I feel I've said all I've needed to say when to comes to, say, the 'X-Men.' I think I've hit the bright points, I think I've hit what I wanted to hit, and I can be happy moving on doing other things.”

“Individual writers can certainly make a difference, but they are working within a system, an institution, that still holds tremendous power over whose voices are heard and whose voices are rewarded.”

“A novel is 400 pages; it's an endurance race. There's no artist, so I have to describe everything. It's all prose. Whereas with comics, I can rely on the artist. It's really wonderful to have that collaboration and to not always feel the burden of describing everything myself and also just to have someone who can paint the world.”

“As a writer - and a romance novelist, no less - I've always found it a bit odd when characters in comic books remain in relationship limbo for years at a time.”

“When I'm writing comics, I'm also visualizing how the story will look on the page - not even always art-wise, but panel-wise, like how a moment will be enhanced dramatically by simply turning a page and getting a reveal. It requires thinking about story in a way I never had to consider when I was writing prose.”

“Freedom to tell any story I want, with all the imaginary tools of my trade, is why I love writing novels. I love taking an idea, fleshing it out into a new world - and going on adventures with characters who day-dream themselves into existence and take on lives of their own.”

“I don't want it to be a mission, but of course I always love to see more diversity in comics. I always love to see more women.”

“Every single girl in the world has had to fight to have herself heard, to have space, and to have a self in societies that try their best to deny them all three.”

“It's very scary to become someone new, to take that path less followed.”

“My dad is Chinese, and my mom is a white American, and they married only ten years after the United States Supreme Court ruled that it was illegal to ban mixed marriages. Imagine that. Marriages between people of different races - now common and accepted - were illegal in many states up until the late Sixties.”

“People either fall into two camps, where they're pro-fanfic, or they're anti-fanfic. I would not have had the skills to write and publish my first novel if I hadn't been writing fanfic.”

“I didn't know how to write comics. I had to teach myself.”

“I think when you look at the diversity of the readership, all the different people who love comics, I want comics to reflect the real world, and I think Marvel does a good job of trying to do that, but I don't think there's ever an end point when it comes to creating diversity and creating stories that people can relate to.”

“When I first came to comics, it was, like, dudes. The feeling, the air, the presence is overwhelmingly male.”