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Joss Whedon

Joss Whedon Quotes

Screenwriter

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Famous Joss Whedon Quotes

“I think the Trump thing is particularly egregious, and I think he's as much a product of the GOP lie machine in the era of Roger Ailes as he is of television. And also, of the Twitter era. Of the everything-is-as-reductive-as-it-can-be. To me, the most telling thing is we have a man who cannot complete a sentence. Certainly could never get to 140 characters, or past it. He thinks in tiny little bursts - the way he tweets.”

“I am a huge fan of what Marvel has established. But when they first came to me, Thor and Captain America were not even close to being finished. I thought to myself, 'Okay, you have all these moving parts, but how can you possibly bring them together?' Iron Man, Hulk, Thor and Captain America don't seem like they could co-exist, and ultimately that is what intrigued me and made me think, 'This can be done and this should be done.' You can't put these characters in a movie together without a certain amount of humor. It's an inoculation against the unreality.”

“When you see these characters like Captain America or Thor, laughing at their own situation or about how strange they are, then you are able to accept more readily that it's fine to wear a cape. You can also accept that it's fine to be enormous and green, or to shoot arrows at aliens racing through the sky. It all makes sense if you've been able to laugh at it and with it.”

“At the end of the day I have many answers for it. It has to do with my mom, who was an extraordinary woman, and a great feminist. It has to do with the people in my life. It has to do with a lot of different things, but -- I don't know! Because I'm not just writing from the female characters for other people. I have a desire to see them in our culture -- that was not met for most of my childhood. Except occasionally by James Cameron. [From the 2011 San Diego Comic Con, in response to being asked why he writes strong female characters.]”

“People want the tragedy. They need things to go wrong, they need the tension. In my characters there’s a core of trust and love that I’m very committed to. These guys would die for each other, and it’s very beautiful. But at the same time, you can’t keep that safety. Things have to go wrong, bad things have to happen.”

“Equality is not a concept. It's not something we should be striving for. It's a necessity. Equality is like gravity, we need it to stand on this earth as men and women, and the misogyny that is in every culture is not a true part of the human condition. It is life out of balance and that imbalance is sucking something out of the soul of every man and woman who's confronted with it. We need Equality, and we kind of need it now. 'So why do you write these strong female characters?' Because you're still asking that question.”