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. – Greg Rucka
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. – Greg Rucka
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. – Greg Rucka
Every writer is going to end up drawing from their own experiences in one way or another. – Greg Rucka
When we’re 16, we have lots of heavy thoughts. And these are the heavy thoughts, where, when we’re in our 30s, we look at 16-year olds and sort of scorn it. – Greg Rucka
What we want to see is stories that are going to be honest stories about the characters that we’re telling them about. – Greg Rucka
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. – Greg Rucka
I’m not a huge Lovecraft fan as far as that goes; I think there are some stories of his that are really quite wonderful, but for the most part, I have great difficulties with his prose – and the more you know about the man, the harder it is to separate him from the work in many ways. – Greg Rucka
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. – Greg Rucka
There are so many great characters because one of the things that makes Batman fantastic is that Batman is tragic. I’ve said this elsewhere; I’ve said it over and over again, but the beauty of the character is that he’s a Don Quixote. – Greg Rucka
We seek to craft characters who inspire empathy: characters our audience will care for and, as a result, will care about what happens to them and thus will share the journey we have charted. A story, after all, is the character’s journey. – Greg Rucka
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. – Greg Rucka
It’s funny because you know the novel process: you get the drafts, you get the galley, and then you get the galley proofs. You have opportunities to change things all along. But the further along in the process you go, the more careful you have to be in making those changes, and the smaller the changes have to be. – Greg Rucka
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. – Greg Rucka
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? – Greg Rucka
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. – Greg Rucka
I tend to see – socially, I don’t tend to be myself in a male role. I don’t know any other way to put it. – Greg Rucka
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. – Greg Rucka
The stories that are out and the things that have been published are a sample of my interests. There are genres and sub-genres that I haven’t waded into but have wanted to, or have waded into in other places but never actually written. – Greg Rucka
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. – Greg Rucka
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. – Greg Rucka
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. – Greg Rucka
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. – Greg Rucka
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. – Greg Rucka
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.’ – Greg Rucka
