Quotes from Greg Rucka

she'd discovered three with their programs intact; one of them, to her delight, had been a flight simulator.

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 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?

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?

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 you can't repeat beats. If you're doing something in one book, you can't do the exact same thing in another book.

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

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

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.'

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

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.

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.

I met one of my best resources because I cold-called the local FBI office one day early in my career with questions. The agent who took the call knew someone who knew someone who was ex-Army, trained in personal protection. The resulting introduction was one of the best, most enduring friendships I've ever enjoyed.

Emotional honesty transcends reality; it's what allows disbelief to be suspended and yet what makes a story stay true.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Speaking as a father, there is no rulebook, and you don't know how to do it. You just do the best you can.

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.

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.

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.