G. Willow Wilson

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.

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.

I think every Muslim woman has to feel the world out for herself.

When I am in Egypt, I am along for the ride - I am a privileged outsider, but an outsider nonetheless.

'Butterfly Mosque' came out of the emails I wrote to family and friends back home after moving to Egypt.

When we read fiction, we want to get outside of ourselves and are able to see from a perspective we haven't seen through before. That can be very powerful.

I keep setting the bar higher for myself in terms of what I'm trying to accomplish.

People love to talk about new and different. They don't always love to buy and read new and different.

When you write for a comic series, many superheroes have 60 or some years of history that you are coming into.

I was born in New Jersey and lived there until I was about 10, so Jersey is in my roots.

When I need guidance or just to kvetch or to bounce ideas off of people, I go to Gail Simone, who is very much kind of the den mother of all of us who are working comics.

In comics, we're all weird together. I can go to a comics convention and not stand out, even though I'm the only woman in a headscarf there, because the guy next to me has a beard and a Sailor Moon costume.

Superheroes don't often get their powers in one fell swoop. It's like superhero puberty.

The road to democracy is rarely smooth, but for Egyptian women, it has been exceptionally bumpy.

I didn't believe in spiritual homelands, and found God as readily in a strip mall as in a mosque.

The 'Islam vs. the West' dialogue ceased to be about real people a long time ago.

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.

The story of a passionate woman in a stale marriage is as old as Helen of Troy.

I think that's a huge theme in superhero books across the board: When you have this massive power, how do you use it responsibly? When do you intervene? Those are the big questions.

I think comics are really part of The Zeitgeist. They reflect back to us the issues that we're concerned about in the time they are written.