Frank Miller famous quotes

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.
-- Frank Miller

#Dirty #Hero #Artist

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.
-- Frank Miller

#New York #Home #Drawing

Sometimes the solitary voice can be the best one.
-- Frank Miller

#Voice #Sometimes #Being The Best

It's one thing to be sitting at a drawing board, alone in your home and coming up with a fantasy character, and drawing her whichever way you feel like drawing, then dealing with a real performer. All of a sudden, things change. It's amazing, in working with actors, how much I learn from them and how many new lines will come to mind because of their personality or their strengths.
-- Frank Miller

#Real #Character #Home

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

#Medicine #Forget

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."
-- Frank Miller

#Eye #Thinking #Boys

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.
-- Frank Miller

#Men #Cities #Enemy

I'm not going to complain about the fact that people are paying attention to my work. I suppose that wouldn't be fair.
-- Frank Miller

#People #Complaining #Attention

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

#America #Captains

I prefer to write and draw in the privacy of my home and with total freedom and then take it to the lion's den.
-- Frank Miller

#Home #Writing #Lions

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 coats. So that's what I write about.
-- Frank Miller

#Book #Writing #Artist

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.
-- Frank Miller

#Jobs #Book #Writing

When I'm writing a comic book, I'm thinking about a character that I'm going to be drawing on the page. I've never drawn a character to look like who I want to cast in a movie because I don't think that way. I'm a real monomaniac. I do one thing at a time.
-- Frank Miller

#Real #Book #Character

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.
-- Frank Miller

#Technology #Thinking #Skills

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.
-- Frank Miller

#Real #Hero #Dark

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 isn't working out perfectly every time.
-- Frank Miller

#Thinking #Work Out #Acting

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.
-- Frank Miller

#Book #Eye #Black And White

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.
-- Frank Miller

#Girl #Real #Kids

Comic-book pages are vertical, and movie screens are relentlessly horizontal. But it's all the same form. We use different tools, but we get the job done. I'm completely in love with CGI. It's great for conveying a cartoonist's sense of reality.
-- Frank Miller

#Jobs #Book #Reality

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

#Pez

When you think of what Americans accomplished, building these amazing cities and all the good it's done in the world, it's kind of disheartening to hear so much hatred of America, not just from abroad, but internally.
-- Frank Miller

#Thinking #Cities #America

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.
-- Frank Miller

#Cutting #Thinking #Names

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

#Dog #Fire #Bunch

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.
-- Frank Miller

#Book #Thinking #Want

Hollywood is a town; it's not a medium. And cinema is a medium you can practice anywhere.
-- Frank Miller

#Practice #Towns #Hollywood

But I'm not trying to convince anybody how to vote or how to live. Nobody's ever successfully accused me of being realistic.
-- Frank Miller

#Being Real #Trying #Vote

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.
-- Frank Miller

#New York #Thinking #Views

Comics are so full of amazing work. And I can't look at a drawing of a woman without thinking of, for instance, Wallace Wood and his amazing way of capturing beauty.
-- Frank Miller

#Thinking #Drawing #Looks

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.
-- Frank Miller

#Stupid #Character #Mean

And I was going to be damned if I was older than Batman.
-- Frank Miller

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

#Writing #Journalism #Show Business

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.
-- Frank Miller

#Character #People #Tests

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.
-- Frank Miller

#Turns #I Realized

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.
-- Frank Miller

#Country #Wish #Atrocities

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.
-- Frank Miller

#Art #Communication #Comic

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

#Book #Mean #World

I can tell you squat about Islamism. But I know a lot about Al Quaeda, and they need to burn in hell.
-- Frank Miller

#Needs #Als #Hell

My Sin City heroes are knights in dirty, blood-caked armor. They bring justice to a world that gives them no medals, no praise, no reward. That world, that city, often kills them for their brave service.
-- Frank Miller

#Dirty #Hero #Knights

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.
-- Frank Miller

#New York #Drawing #Cities

I'll make it. I won't die. I've got too much I have to do to let myself die.
-- Frank Miller

#Too Much

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.
-- Frank Miller

#Dark #Views #Opposites

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.
-- Frank Miller

#Happy Life #Long #People

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.
-- Frank Miller

#New York #Writing #Men

I don't own an ounce of the work I've ever done on 'Batman,' and I still work on 'Batman.' I love the character, I think it's a lot of fun, and it's kind of fun to be in that ballpark every once in a while, where you're seeing a different crowd.
-- Frank Miller

#Fun #Character #Thinking

Comic book' has come to mean a specific genre, not a story form, in people's minds. So someone will call 'Die Hard' a 'comic-book movie,' when it has nothing to do with comic books. I'd rather have comics be the vehicle by which stories are told.
-- Frank Miller

#Book #Mean #People

It is more raw and unfettered and I'm more likely going into something you could call extreme cartooning. There's a lot of that in the course of 'Holy Terror.' There are interludes where there are pictures - cartoon pictures - of modern figures and they are all wordless. It's up to readers to put the words in.
-- Frank Miller

#Cartoon #Modern #Holy

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

#Fun #Dirty #Naughty

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.
-- Frank Miller

#Men #Hands #Understanding

The American conscience died with the Kennedys.
-- Frank Miller

#Conscience

I take his weapons away from him. Both of them.
-- Frank Miller

#Weapons

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

#World #Force #Make Sense

I always knew it would come down to you and the big blue school boy. Planet's too big for the BOTH of you. When it all comes down, I want a piece of him. A small piece, will do? For OLD TIMES, sake, you know..it still hurts when its cold.
-- Frank Miller

#Hurt #School #Boys

A gun is a liar's weapon
-- Frank Miller

#Liars #Gun #Weapons

Of course we're Criminals
-- Frank Miller

#Criminals

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

#Wire #Cuffs #Razors

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

#Twists #Want #Littles

This should be agony. I should be a mass of aching muscle - broken, spent, unable to move. And, were I an older man, I surely would ... ... but I'm a man of thirty - of twenty again. The rain on my chest is a baptism - I'm born again ...
-- Frank Miller

#Rain #Moving #Men

The rain on my chest is a baptism - I'm born again.
-- Frank Miller

#Rain #Baptism #Born Again

Nancy's got a guardian angel. Seven feet plus of muscle and mayhem that goes by the name of Marv.
-- Frank Miller

#Angel #Names #Feet

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.
-- Frank Miller

#Horse #Thinking #Church

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.
-- Frank Miller

#Hero #Play #Ugly

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.
-- Frank Miller

#Hero #Government #Stories

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.
-- Frank Miller

#Hero #Feelings #Pay

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

#Objectivity #Complaining #News

Hell’s waking up every ***** day and not even knowing why you’re here.
-- Frank Miller

#Knowing #Wake Up #Waking

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.
-- Frank Miller

#Book #Thinking #World

A man without hope is a man without fear.
-- Frank Miller

#Hope #Men #Without Hope

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.
-- Frank Miller

#Pain #Bullets #Sometimes

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.
-- Frank Miller

#People #Superhero #Guy

I thought Daredevil was kind of cool because he couldn't do anything. I mean, he's blind. It wasn't that he could fly. His major power was an impediment. So I was intrigued. When I took over he was kind of like Spider-Man-lite, but I was able to project a lot of my Catholic imagery onto it. And I'd always wanted to do a crime comic.
-- Frank Miller

#Mean #Men #Catholic

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.
-- Frank Miller

#Looks #Firsts #Cartoonist

You don't... get it, boy... This isn't a mudhole... it's an operating table. And I'm the surgeon.
-- Frank Miller

#Boys #Tables #Surgeons

An old man dies, a little girl lives. Fair trade.
-- Frank Miller

#Girl #Men #Littles

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.
-- Frank Miller

#Gentleman #Safe #Gotham

Alfred: Hmf. I suppose you'll take up flying next, like that fellow in Metropolis.
-- Frank Miller

#Flying #Next #Metropolis

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

#Beautiful #Running #Hands