Mike Mignola Quotes

You have total control of it, and when you're an actor, you're subject to production design and costumes and directors and studio choices and producer choices, but when you're writing it, you're creating your own little world in your head, peopled with your little characters. No one is in there monkeying with it, at least not at first - though they will. With this and the other projects I'm working on, it'll have to be given away, and it'll have to be someone else's property.

I don't claim anything of the work. It is his work. I am like a little pencil in his hand. That is all. He does the thinking. He does the writing. The pencil has nothing to do with it.

The writing is the most important bit, and performing it is just closing the circle because I'm less likely to screw it up than anyone else.

There is nothing more mine than my writing, nothing I'm more proprietary about.

Cry Baby is just a character in this world that I'm trying to create, and the music videos are really important to me, and I've fought to obviously get all of them approved.

Writing a screenplay, I'm like, "All I'm responsible for is that final script, and I take great effort and pride in that." But once I give it to someone to make, I can disassociate with it entirely and not worry that my vision isn't being represented, because I understand fully that that's not how it works.

With the acting, it's somebody else's brainchild, and I'm just sort of helping flesh it out. There's a special satisfaction to being the brains behind the operation.

In a way, editing is not unlike the movies. The best books, just like the best movies, are a collaboration. They're only as good as the compromise made between the artists involved.

I believe in creative control. No matter what anyone makes, they should have control over it.

Some people would ask: 'You are not the one who does the painting, or shot the work, how can it be your work?' But I was the one who chose which site we should use, and which assistant helps me to do the painting, or the shot.

I had always felt deep down that I owned the characters. Much as I adored and cherished the work of my actors, I felt that they were cast to do and be what I could not physically do or be.

My cartoon life is in my office, and it's very separate and getting very in my own head. My television life is I'm begging one of the actors to say the line in the way I'd like them to.

If you write, produce and direct, you own things and see them through to the end.

I discovered Einstein said the same thing about his celebrated theories of relativity that writers say about their work when he said he didn't have any feelings of personal possession of these ideas. Once they were out there, they came from somewhere else. And that's exactly the feeling when you write. You don't feel possessive about it.

For me, the most important thing is the writing - and certainly the director. But if the writing isn't there, it doesn't matter who the director is!

On one level, all of the characters in 'Game of Thrones' grow out of George R.R. Martin's imagination. Therefore they are his. As long as they are in the novels they are his. But the moment they step forth onto the TV screen, they become filtered through the showrunners. In a business sense, it's the same way with comics.

Only I hold the right to all my songs.

I've always believed that the script is the boss.

Basically, I'm a writer. I'm the proprietor of the vision. I alone know what I eventually want to happen on the screen. So if you have a valuable idea, the only way to protect it is to direct it.

I'm completely in control of creating my photographs, and I'm not always in complete control of creating a character. It's more of a way to express myself than acting is, by far.

I think that it's worthwhile to explore the ways in which you write the person that's writing your plays as opposed to simply assuming that it's all a natural process and there's no design in it. Because your public persona is designed, to a certain extent, and you can have fun and profit at various times doing that.

When I'm writing my album, it's totally my world. Even though it's myself and another producer creating the project, Conceptually it's more under my power and on my own terms. At the same time, it's a different type of pressure because I'm ultimately speaking, I'm solely responsible for the end result.

Am I allowed to ask my book / whether it's true I wrote it?

I don't think of an actor. I think in the character, and then I search for the actor. Usually I'm thinking without names, because they will change my idea. No big egos. If I want egos - just mine. That is enough.

The character of Brent Spiner. We certainly collaborate on the concept of that, but he basically writes the script, then it's sort of a combination of his voice and my voice.