I'm contractually not allowed to work in comics in the United States other than for Marvel.

It never would have occurred to me in 'Days of Future Past' to cast Peter Dinklage as Bolivar Trask, and yet as soon as he got onscreen I couldn't think of anyone else.

It is very hard for me to think of Logan without thinking of Hugh Jackman and I have no idea who out there could take over from him if they moved ahead. It's like thinking of anyone other than Harrison Ford playing Han Solo or Indiana Jones.

We figured the audience would want good stories, great art, wonderful characters, people you could fall in love with that we would immediately put through hell.

I would like to do a story where the country found itself a presidential candidate who actually will get elected preaching traditional values and then sets out to enforce them, where it actually comes down to the fact that reality as we know it may not be as etched in stone as we tell ourselves it is.

I never talk about work in progress because once I talk about it I don't do it anymore.

There's some good films, there's some films that could be improved. So we keep trying until we get it right. That's the nature of storytelling, whether it's on paper or on film.

Isn't it amazing how the X-Men always managed to be ahead of everybody's curve no matter how they look at it?

In L.A., you have to drive; in New York, you can do it on foot. The variety, the potential, of people is in your face. Like any good creator, you want to steal everything.

One of the seminal moments I remember as a young punk is, when Roy Thomas was doing an editorial read-through of a book before it went to press, and being so gob-smacked by it, he just canceled it right there.

What I love about Hugh Jackman is he just brings all the elements of my vision of Logan. The pain, the nobility, the duality of his existence.

The really nice thing with 'Future Past' is that you actually have a superhero film - much to everyone's surprise, I will hope - that is about something. It's about racism, I hope. It's about resisting oppression. It's about fighting for freedom and the cost of fighting for freedom.

Comics are primal, down and dirty.

The best moments in comics come from a primal image that captures the emotion and the conflict. What you add are the pieces that get you to the point and what happens next.

My resonance to Magneto and Xavier was borne more out of the Holocaust. It was coming face to face with evil, and how do you respond to it? In Magneto's case it was violence begets violence. In Xavier's it was the constant attempt to find a better way.

The more stories I told, the more I found I wanted to tell. There was always something left unsaid. I got hooked by my own impulse of 'Well, what's gonna happen next?'

It's a fascinating world to drop a finished product on the marketplace without the intercession of a publisher.

No matter how good of a ball player you were, you can't keep going forever. You're not going to be able to hit .300 when you're 60. You still look around and you think, 'This is weird. Have I missed something?' Well, yeah, you have.

My relationship with Marvel is that I work for them.

But the key thing was that I knew of no other contrast between Wolverine as we understood him and Logan than you see in his behavior as a roughneck Canadian versus classical samurai society. That's the dichotomy in his soul.

For me that's the magic of the printed page - we don't have to pay attention to the passage of time and focus in on the realities of these characters at a specific age or at a specific time in their lives, and we can play with that to our hearts' content.

Maisie Williams was my first choice to play Wolfsbane when I heard about the 'New Mutants' movie - but in comic books, I can keep the New Mutants adolescent for decades and have as much fun writing them at the end as I did in the beginning.

The one immutable reality of film is, no matter how wonderful the actors and the performances are, every year the actors age and grow older - Sophie Turner's Jean Grey was wonderful!

The wonder, especially about the 'New Mutants' is, they're all kids. They're all growing. They're changing, literally, from page to page in terms of character and approach, past, present, and future. As a writer, that's the most delicious thing to play with.