Greg Rucka

“I'm sick to death of the way the Big Two treat people.”

“I've always had a thing for theme parks and their less-glorious cousins, amusement parks, the carnival midway, and others of such ilk.”

“For those he has ignored, he allows them this. He allows them God, their only ally. Places to worship, but no one to teach.”

“The writer's curse is that the more you fall in love with the work you're doing, the more I think it shows.”

“The goal with 'Alpha' was to run towards the cliches and then to break through them, and that doesn't change depending on the medium.”

“Punisher is scary; he should be scary.”

“For every person who passes on the opportunity to write Spider-Man or Superman, I guarantee there are 5000 hungry writers who would give their eye-teeth to do it. But just because they want to do it, it doesn't mean they are capable of doing it.”

“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.”

“For the light to exist, there must be the dark. For the Force, there must be balance.”

“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?”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“I do crazy amounts of research. I want this stuff to 'work,' so to speak. I need to be, at least to me, believable - because if I feel - if I cannot invest some element of verisimilitude, the reader is absolutely not going to buy in.”

“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.'”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”