Heroic Archetype Quotes

Perseus, you are not the hero.

Each generation needs a 'Spider-Man' to mirror their angst.

The contemporary hero, the mythical pattern in the imitation of whom we would live, remains as yet undefined. We have no hero; what is more to the point, we suspect hero worship.

When I look back at my career, I was always trying to be this particular 'Celtic Warrior' character.

The reluctant hero is always fun to play.

Wonder Woman is not horrible. Her villains should be.

Even if I'm playing a superhero, it has to be steeped in reality.

I think it's more fun to play a hero with an edge.

I was so lucky because what I did in 'Thor' was I built the character from the ground up - the foundations of his spirit, really. He was someone who was born with an expectation that he would one day be a king, born with an entitlement.

I think it's very admirable, in a superhero movie, to be able to take a few risks.

I'm not building each one character around one metaphor, so much as trying to build a heroic archetype that can be used to express the kind of metaphors that I find in each story.

Escapism has its place. I used to write 'Conan the Barbarian' for Marvel, which takes place in an environment completely removed from the real world.

I think a lot of superheroes seem to have the same value system; they just have a different costume. They're all doing exactly the same thing.

There's a call to adventure. It's something in the inner psyche of humanity, particularly males.

Certain characters, mostly heroes, have to be the straight silent type; that is part of the make-up.

I don't believe in superheroes but I love Batman movies. There's a part of every person that is entertained by the idealistic, the fantastic.

That whole heroic notion of the women warriors known as Amazons is extremely appealing. It was appealing in antiquity, and, throughout the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, they're always portrayed as heroic, courageous, and the equals of men, and that's just extremely attractive and has been since antiquity.

Because it all derived from Superman. I mean, I love all the characters, but Superman is just this perfect human pop-culture distillation of a really basic idea. He's a good guy. He loves us. He will not stop in defending us. How beautiful is that? He's like a sci-fi Jesus. He'll never let you down. And only in fiction can that guy actually exist, because real guys will always let you down one way or another. We actually made up an idea that beautiful. That's just cool to me. We made a little paper universe where all of the above is true.

I think there's a moral imperative when you're writing fictional heroes to give characters who somehow give us something to aspire to as opposed to dragging them down to our level.

Superman tends to stand very upright, and he's very symmetrical, and those are actually the most difficult poses for me to draw.