Top 45 Greg Rucka Quotes

My college senior thesis was going to be on the American private investigator.

Every character needs an adversary – one who is both challenging and a contrast for the hero. The best adversaries reveal something about the character they’re contrasting.

If someone arrives, fully functional yet a tabula rasa, how does their environment influence, educate, even mold them? And if that is a nurture question, then where does that character’s nature fit in? How does that manifest?

Comics fans want new stuff that looks exactly like the old stuff. It is hard for the publishers, and even the audience, to change something.

I think Batman has the Wolverine problem. I think he’s overexposed.

I love doing research. It’s like cheating, but with permission.

A character wandering around asking, ‘Who am I?’ isn’t, in and of itself, a story I’m interested in telling.

I’m a fan of genre in the abstract, but at best, perhaps all we can really say when we talk about genre is that we’re talking about an umbrella that covers a kind of story with certain elements.

You know how a nonlethal weapon is supposed to work? A nonlethal weapon works on the basis of three things: It needs to deter, and that’s normally done through pain, and that pain creates a byproduct, which is fear.

Character is made up of a variety of different things. One of those elements is gender.

For me, plot always comes out of character, so I had to be sure of my characters.

DC are playing catch up with Marvel because of things like ‘The Avengers’ breaking six hundred million domestic.

All the sudden, I was part of the ‘No Man’s Land’ thing, and there was a bundle of core writers for that, but somewhere along the line, I became the go-to guy after that initial arc.

The worst thing that can happen for a writer is for a writer to start believing their own press. I think the industry, and the comics industry in particular, is littered with the bodies of writers who believed their own press. And you can see the moment they did, and then the work nosedives.

I love liminal characters. I love these characters that are outside and enter and consequently are perpetually outsiders, and who hold themselves to a higher standard.

You have to accept that Batman is a fact of life in Gotham City, and on top of that, you have to accept that somehow this city manages to function with a police force that’s 90% corrupt.

Good fiction can both entertain and light up those dark corners where nice people don’t want to go.

There is a sequence in my ‘Detective Comics’ run where you can’t find consecutive issues by the same artist. That’s intentional. That was done on purpose.

I like the ‘Keystone Kops’ storyline. It didn’t actually go quite the way I wanted to, but it was another great way to show how different life was in these two different corners of the DCU, being on the ground in these different areas.

When I was in third grade, I would run home – literally run home from school – and if I could make it in time, I could get home and the put the TV on in time to catch the answering machine message at the start of ‘The Rockford Files.’

I’m sick to death of the way the Big Two treat people.

I just know that if you make a Superman movie you can’t take kids to, you’ve done something wrong.

To me, the joy you’re going to get in a ‘Punisher’ story is watching him punish incredibly wicked people. Now, if you can add to that an emotional content, wonderful.

Punisher is scary; he should be scary.

The first story I can remember writing, that I truly set down on paper, was a Christmas story that I wrote when I was ten years old.

There are still plenty of people who want to burn me at the stake for my Wonder Woman run. And I can’t really blame them, you know? That was my take on the character, and when people are invested in the characters, they see them very clearly and in the way they like.

I am the product of Denny O’Neil in many ways, I carry forth a lot of what Denny instilled in me.

When there’s a clear vision, and you’ve got the creative teams working toward that goal, each on their own, it can then come together quite elegantly at the endpoint.

When I was in high school, I started writing a serial novel, longhand, set in the Arthurian mythos, and influenced not incidentally by Marion Zimmer Bradley’s ‘The Mists of Avalon.’

Like nightclubs and sporting events, entry into an amusement park is a permission to become someone else. We come for the experience and to relish it.

I think if you look back at some of the stuff that we broadly label as the crime ‘ouvre,’ there are certainly elements of the supernatural at work.

Your ability to name every single variation of Kryptonite and every first issue in which it appears is a great pop quiz skill, but is not a great writing skill, all right? So just because you can do that doesn’t mean you know how to write.

I’m a Caucasian American Jew. These are all things that make up who I am.

I think that Batman loses his efficacy and mythology if he’s got too many people around him. That’s what the Justice League is for, you know what I mean?

I think there are certain questions that get asked in comics over and over again, and people want definitive answers, but I feel like there shouldn’t be definitive answers.

We wanted to talk about death in the DC Universe, and how some people go to get a pass and come back, and some people didn’t. That opened up a whole other topic about legacy. We wanted to talk about what was required to be a hero, what were the elements of true heroism?

When I started out as a novelist, I thought I was going to be a private-eye writer. That was my intent, and that’s what I studied, I mean, scholarly.

Fear is one of the elements of nonlethal weaponry. You’re going to get hurt, and you don’t want to get hurt. Pepper spray hurts. You don’t want to be sprayed. That’s why it’s a useful deterrent as a nonlethal weapon – I’m not advocating spraying people randomly.

I showed up pretty much at the exact right moment to end up with a lot of work on my plate very quickly, because I was young and foolish, and so I wrote very quickly.

Some of the best moments I’ve ever written have come about because someone, somewhere, blew my preconceptions out of the water and dropped a detail in passing that took the work in an entirely new, entirely unexpected, direction.

We forget when we’re all grown up. 16 was a long time ago. It’s hard to remember how freakin’ difficult it is as 16! Life is not easy, and you’re trying to figure stuff out.

Superman is precisely what we should be teaching our children. Superman inspires us to our best.

The goal of ‘Revelations’ is that once it’s all done and finished, and you’ve read all of it, it is its own story.

I write characters. Some of those characters are women.

I love ‘The Omen,’ just as a piece of plotting.