G. Willow Wilson Quotes
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If you love things or ideas or people that contradict each other, you have to be prepared to fight for every square inch of intellectual real estate you occupy.
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We don't want to create a literary ghetto in which black writers are only allowed to write black characters and women writers are put on 'girl books.'
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Because the traditional mode of dress for Muslim women is so distinct - the headcovering, which is not there for guys - women carry a greater burden of representation than Muslim men do in non-Muslim societies.
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Sometimes, by using the most over-the-top, ridiculous plot device you can imagine, you get some interesting little conflicts and cool things that you might not otherwise have a chance to explore.
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There is a certain danger in thinking about diversity in its own little box, as something that is somehow separate from 'normal' comic books and comics creators.
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Despite all the criticisms that have been leveled at the comics community, both in terms of fans and creators, I have always felt more comfortable and accepted in the comics community than I have in any other medium of publishing that I've had the pleasure of working in.
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Ninety percent of the comic books I've written in the past had little or nothing to do with Islam.
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I tend to deal with characters who are sort of at that same point of wrestling with, 'Who am I going to be as an adult? What do I believe? How am I defining myself in the context of my culture and my peer groups, my family?'
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I don't think being a writer who is religious means you have to write about nothing but religion. When I do write about religion, it's to inform the story, not to push a certain agenda.
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In many countries in the Middle East - and this is changing in the wake of the Arab Spring - but for a long time, censorship of books and film was a very big deal. There were books you couldn't buy; things with political content would be censored, but there were some genres of books and film that the censors just didn't understand.
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The 'Islam vs. the West' dialogue ceased to be about real people a long time ago.
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In the West, anything that must be hidden is suspect; availability and honesty are interlinked. This clashes irreconcilably with Islam, where the things that are most precious, most perfect and most holy are always hidden: the Kaaba, the faces of prophets and angels, a woman's body, Heaven.
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Americans look at the Middle East as a source of trauma because of 9/11. At the same time, I could see the fear going on in the Middle East as well - which would be the next country to be invaded or sanctioned? Being around those tensions was traumatic for me.
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The transition between life in red-state America and life in the Arab capital was at times overwhelming because of the traditional segregation of men and women in many public and private settings.
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'Butterfly Mosque' came out of the emails I wrote to family and friends back home after moving to Egypt.
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The Qur'an is in many ways far less concrete than the Bible, relying on the esoteric more often than the apparent.
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When I am in Egypt, I am along for the ride - I am a privileged outsider, but an outsider nonetheless.
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It seems like whenever you write about Muslims, people assume that you're writing about the Quran, you are writing about the Prophet Muhammad. There's no sense that Muslims are capable of individualism, that they're capable of making mistakes that are somehow not connected to Islam.
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The Qur'an is God's property, not mine.
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'Lost' seems to be the inverse of 'Air': It explores dispossession and identity by forcing a bunch of people into one invented landscape instead of using many invented landscapes to keep people apart.
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The first comic I ever read was an 'X-Men' themed anti-smoking PSA they gave out in health class when I was about 10.
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It's patently impossible for a Muslim character to represent 'all Muslims.'
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To me, a staircase looks like a series of dark and light horizontal stripes, which is exactly how you'd draw a staircase. So I know how the image is going to look on the page.
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To me, writing an ongoing series feels like driving a freight train downhill. All you can do is steer and pray.