Perfect heroes are cool, but no one can really empathize or identify with them.
I'm always much more interested in flawed heroes than in perfect ones.
As a successful romantic novelist - one of my publishers is Mills & Boon - I create the sort of male heroes that no woman could fail to adore and few real men could hope to emulate.
Guys like Alvin Adams, Sweet D Walter Davis, Larry Nance, and Kyle Macy became my basketball heroes.
Real heroes are all around us and uncelebrated.
People look at Marvel movies as epic in scope, but if you look back at the comics, you realise that Marvel heroes were often a reaction to the square-jawed DC characters like Superman, who were flawless and beyond reproach.
I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are.
September 11th has produced only miniature heroes because our culture has freed itself from many of the old, dangerous, elitist fantasies of heroism... But in so doing, we have not only tamed and diminished heroes. We have risked taming and diminishing ourselves.
My heroes are people like Picasso and Miro and people who at last really reach something in their old age, which they absolutely couldn't ever have done in their youth.
For the finale, I thought the audience deserved to get a close point of view on the monster, and to recognize him the way you recognize the heroes of 'True Detective.'
In a sense, by closing off the idea that young Muslims, and particularly young Muslim men, can be American heroes, it increases the chance that they'll try to be some other kind of hero. And that, I think, is entirely counterproductive.
I did a picture 40 years ago with Carroll O'Connor and Telly Savalas, God rest their souls, and Clint Eastwood, called 'Kelly's Heroes,' which we filmed in Yugoslavia for six months.
I met all my heroes on the oldies circuit: Gary U.S. Bonds, Lloyd Price, Little Richard.
The SEALs have a sense of community I've never seen anywhere. Not just the guys but the wives, widows, kids of fallen heroes.
In most shows, there's usually a hero or a protagonist, and even if there are multiple heroes or protagonists, most shows try and make it so you really always know who's the good guy and who's the bad guy.
You know how most kids have posters of sports heroes on their walls? They gave me reams of the old news copy, and I had those taped in my bedroom. And I would practice reading the news.
We're past the age of heroes and hero kings... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.
No one wants to see a person on TV who's super-ultra-cool. That's Superman, that's a thing of the past. Heroes are now flawed, and have terrible tempers, you know? They're real people.
Heroes always make the right decision; I find that seldom happens in my life.
I spent my life playing heroes because I looked like one.
My mother and father were partisan national heroes: I learned sacrifice and discipline from them and that a private life is not as important as the message you want to leave.
My off-the-field heroes, the people who gave me the values to live by and who inspired me with their hard work and unselfish dedication to their family, were my mom, Catherine, and my dad, William.
I like grey characters; fantasy for too long has been focused on very stereotypical heroes and villains.
Only heroes get stereotyped. As they do the same kind of roles again and again.
I want Green Arrow to have fun. I don't want him to be a tortured hero. I mean, I've written plenty of tortured heroes, like Daredevil. But it's all there in Daredevil's origin as to why he'd be a tortured adult. Green Arrow doesn't have that kind of origin. In fact, he's such a clean slate that he doesn't even have an origin anymore.
Twitter brings you closer. I mean, we see this over and over again from our users. It brings them closer to the action. It brings them closer to their heroes.
Richard Burton is one of my heroes.
I loved being on stage with heroes of mine, like Gregg Edelman and Jimmy Walton, and the lovely Chita Rivera and Stephanie J. Block.
I love Steve Carell and Will Ferrell - they're my heroes.
I hope we see more stories where the heroes are real heroes, real people that don't need weapons or super powers to change people's lives.
Heroes in drama are people who try hard to reach a virtuous ideal. And whether they succeed or fail really doesn't matter - it's the trying that counts.
I gathered as much reading material about Aung San Suu Kyi and about Burma as I could. And I read every article and every book she had written. I also had 200 hours of footage of her to watch. I tried to discover who were her heroes and where he desire and strength to pursue democracy in a non-violent fashion came from.
I admire many people, but I am not sure that I have any 'heroes.'
I think showing heroes as fallible helps us and reminds us that we are ourselves fallible and no man is perfect but we can still achieve great things.
The heroes of my childhood were Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy... but I was inspired by the ideals of our 40th president and became a Republican.
They say never meet your heroes. But the addendum to that is 'unless they're Harrison Ford.'
