G. Willow Wilson

“Festivals and fasts are unhinged, traveling backward at a rate of ten days per year, attached to no season. Even Laylat ul Qadr, the holiest night in Ramadan, drifts--its precise date is unk...”

“The force that played havoc with the cortisol in my blood was the same force that helped my body recover; if I felt better one day and worse the next, it was unchanged. It chose no side. It...”

“I have had much experience with the unclean and uncivilized in the recent past. Shall I tell you what I discovered? I am not the state of my feet. I am not the dirt on my hands or the hygien...”

“For most inhabitants of the Arab world, the prevailing cultural attitude toward women - fed and encouraged by Wahhabi doctrine, which is based on Bedouin social norms rather than Islamic jur...”

“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 could...”

“That's something the head scarf, in a symbolic way, is meant to do in Arabic culture: it defines your relationship to your husband and the men of your family differently than your relationsh...”

“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...”

“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.”

“'Air' is what the world looks like: An inconvenient mashup of human politics and divine geography. We leave bits and pieces of ourselves and our history in every place we encounter.”

“My career is a black comedy of sorts. I spent a lot of time explaining myself to various different groups. But more and more, I'm finding that the desire to communicate, which all these audi...”

“The script for what would eventually become my first graphic novel, 'Cairo,' sort of came to me in kind of a bolt of lightning within 24 hours of having moved to that city. Just a jumble of...”

“A lot of my writer friends - some of whom are brilliant - work when the Muse calls them, for lack of a better description. You know, days of nothing, then this creative burst where they writ...”

“In 2003, as a 21-year-old convert to Islam, I moved from Colorado to Cairo to see what life was like in a Muslim country.”

“I think any time you have a super team, whether it's all men or all women or both, what you have are people with very unique strengths that aren't always totally compatible.”

“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.”

“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...”

“Being a Muslim in America, I've noticed that there's a ton of crossover between the Muslim community and geekdom.”

“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.”

“Thematically, in a lot of what I write, there's a sense of displacement, of being rooted in multiple places, and how that can tug at your identities and your wants and your goals.”

“To me, writing an ongoing series feels like driving a freight train downhill. All you can do is steer and pray.”