I want to be better than five guys. I was that way when I used to box, I was that way in any sport. I want to compete with five other guys. If I beat five other guys, I'd like to see if I can beat six.
I wouldn't call Adolf Hitler a corporal. Adolf Hitler was looked up to. He was revered almost like a God because he was feared. Adolf Hitler took all of Europe, and my generation had to confront Adolf Hitler.
I'm not the sort of fellow who does the same thing all the time. I began using a lot of science fiction apparatus. I came out with the atom bomb two years before it was actually used because I read in the paper that a fellow named Nicola Tesla was working on the atom bomb.
I'm not interested in the ego trip of creating or not creating. I'm interested in selling a magazine. Rock-bottom, I sell magazines. I'm a thorough professional who does his job.
If you're a thorough professional, and they won't let you do a professional job, nobody's going to benefit from it. The people who produce it won't benefit. The people who buy it won't benefit from it. They're going to get a half-assed product.
I came out of school one day, and there was this pulp magazine. It was a rainy day, and it was floating toward the sewer in the gutter. So I pick up this pulp magazine, and it's Wonder Stories, and it's got a rocket-ship on the cover, and I'd never seen a rocket-ship.
I was being brought up on peasant stories; my mother came from Europe and she'd been a peasant and that was the area where the Frankensteins and the Draculas came from and it was entertainment for the people. Nobody had TV, and that was the way peasants would entertain themselves, by telling these stories.
I hated to fight all the time just to enjoy my day. Fighting wasn't the kind of thing that I enjoyed, but I grew to enjoy it because I did it so long.
Mort Meskin was a consummate professional, dedicated to his work. A great talent.
Comics have a caste system - an editor has to act in a certain way, an artist has to be humble.
I'm OMAC! Evacuate this section! I'm going to destroy it!
My parents loved me. My father used to carry me around on my shoulders. I know my father loved me. All families love their children, and we were good boys.
An American is a guy, a rich guy with a family, a decent guy with a family with as many kids as he likes, doing what he wants, working with people that he likes, and enjoying himself to his very old age.
My purpose was what my father's purpose was - to make a living and to have a family. I was going to do the right thing. My dream to me was to have money to support it and to live in the kind of house I liked.
I would've liked to have been a better businessman when I was younger. And of course, I couldn't, because it wasn't part of my atmosphere. I never lived with accountants, I never lived with lawyers.
I always enjoyed doing monster books. Monster books gave me the opportunity to draw things out of the ordinary. Monster books were a challenge - what kind of monster would fascinate people?
My ambition was always to be a perfect picture of an American.
My own son feels I'm uncool but my grandson loves me. Being cool or uncool is a generational thing. But as a personal thing, I really love everybody in sight.
I took a great joy with inventing new kinds of mechanisms. I invented new kinds of machines. I've been a student of science fiction for a long, long time, and I'm very well-versed in science fact and science fiction.
I feel like an independent man, and I am. This is the kind of feeling I always wanted. You can rarely get that... Well, I could rarely get that in the early part of my life.
I always resent anybody interfering with anybody else trying to do his job. Everybody has his own job to do. If he's good, he'll do well, but if he's mediocre, he's not going to do as well as he should.
I've done things that I wouldn't ordinarily seem capable of doing. And I've proven myself in situations where there's life and death at stake. And so, I can live with myself knowing that it's not a matter of guts or anything like that. It's a matter of willingness to go the length, to transcend yourself.
I don't want to take somebody else's beating. That makes me unhappy.
I had very high respect for the Pratt Institute, but I thought that I had done my best, and that was not their version of the best.
Speaking as a human being, not as a businessman - the unions are great. The unions are great for the working people because they protect you, but I didn't see them that way as a young man. First of all, the papers would connect them with thee communists - labor unions were communists.
