Marc Guggenheim quotes:

+1
Share
Pin
Like
Send
Share
  • Imagine if Steve Jobs or Thomas Edison or Albert Einstein were all alive 10, 20, 30 years before we know them to be alive; it would have advanced the world that much sooner.

  • We're huge fans of 'Game of Thrones' for example, 'Orphan Black.' And even though those shows don't necessarily correlate directly with 'Arrow,' I'm a very big believer that writers are the product of their inspirations.

  • The similarity between Iron Man and Green Lantern is, unlike Superman or any of the X-Men or Spider-Man, anyone can be Green Lantern or Iron Man. All you need is the ring or the suit.

  • On 'Arrow,' we have Ray Palmer and Roy Harper, and if you call Roy 'Ray' and Ray 'Roy,' you have to put money into the jar.

  • There's a lot of downtime where you're filling your car up with gas, you're driving to work, you're stuck in traffic - it's Los Angeles, and so much of it is a car lifestyle.

  • Whenever you can manoeuvre your characters into a situation where they both have a good argument to make, you're on the right track.

  • I think it's very hard to talk about these characters in a closed-ended, sort of non-sequel way, especially characters like The Flash and Green Lantern, which have such rich, long histories.

  • The nice thing about 'Arrow' is we never say never on the show. Hopefully the show will have a nice long life, and all manner of things can potentially happen.

  • The Sixth Sense' was a very enjoyable, successful movie despite the fact that there were plenty of people, including myself, who saw the ending coming.

  • I think 'Green Lantern' has the potential to be a very highly regarded superhero movie. We're approaching it with such respect and such care.

  • With 'The Flash' in existence, there's no real compelling reason for us to do superpowers on 'Arrow.'

  • I came up professionally as a lawyer, and when you're a lawyer, writing a 50-page brief in one night is just another day at the office. You learn to make choices really quickly, and you learn how to get thoughts down very quickly.

  • I remember the dark days when, thanks to 1966's 'Batman' with Adam West, comics were considered the ugly stepchild of popular culture.

  • I'm a huge fan of 'The Six Million Dollar Man' and I love the episodes where they would cross over with 'The Bionic Woman.'

  • I think comic books have come an incredibly far way, and I want to make sure we don't take a step back. I certainly don't want my name on a movie that would take it back.

  • Try to imagine a character like Batman whose whole life has been about fighting crime, whose whole existence and identity is his war against criminals, and he wakes up one morning to discover there are no criminals. What happens to him?

  • It's always really hard to kill off someone who you just really enjoy working with, writing for, and seeing on the screen.

  • I'm not like Jonathan Hickman, who's able to sort of plot out three years of a book ahead of time. I'm much more of a guy who plots out an arc or two at a time.

  • Time management is really key for me.

  • I'm a very big believer that the reason you've seen this huge surge in superheroes both on television and in film is...part of it of course is zeitgeist. There's no denying that there's a huge appetite on the part of the audience in both TV and film for these kind of adventures.

  • As a fan, I want all of the Marvel TV projects to be successful. I am a comic book fan.

  • It's funny: I like being surprised as a reader, so it's difficult for me to spoil my own stuff.

  • Every season, we spend what really should be our hiatus, and what really should be me relaxing on a beach, planning out the whole season.

  • We have several projects in the pipeline, but one of the rules we set for ourselves is we don't want to solicit or announce any projects that aren't ready for publication. I'm personally really tired of reading about titles that never come out.

  • Fortunately, the DC Universe is full enough and replete enough with every kind of character that you could want, that it's not that hard to find the right character. Sometimes it's nothing more than an Easter egg, or a name drop, and sometimes it's someone like 'Deathstroke,' who is a huge part of the DC Universe.

  • The thing that I've learned, not just from writing comics but also from writing television programs like 'Law & Order,' is that you can fool some of the people some of the time - but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.

  • In the writers' room, when we talk about each episode, we first talk about the character journey of the episode.

  • As always, we start off with asking, 'What's a good episode?' We don't think about timing, and we don't think about logistics. We just think about what would be good.

  • If Hollywood is going to keep going, the writers need to be creatively fulfilled by creating their own things. We need to generate new ideas, so we're not always cannibalizing old ones.

  • I'm not much of a salesman. I prefer the soft sell and the honest approach.

  • At some point if you're a professional writer, no matter what, it always comes down to you staring at the blank page by yourself.

  • At the end of the day, I think the only way to do the kind of job a writer does is push everything aside and just ultimately sit down and do the work.

  • Do what you love and you'll always love what you do. I've found that that's true most of the time.

  • I always think the audience sometimes wants what you're not giving them.

  • I love doing meta-humor, as long as it doesn't become too distracting and it's subtle.

  • I think when it comes to television as opposed to film, the producers really are the writers. We work with people who are purely financial producers.

  • I'm always working on something. I wish I had more time for free-thinking and brainstorming new ideas. That's not to say my mind doesn't wander, but I find myself wishing for more of that kind of time.

  • I'm very fortunate in that all the mediums I work in are extremely collaborative. Movies are probably the most solitary on a day to day basis, but even then you have producers and studio executives to work with and bounce ideas off of.

  • In part, it's so difficult to come up with something original, to come up with a character nowadays. If you created a globetrotting adventurer, he'd be compared to Indiana Jones. If you created a super spy, he'd be compared to James Bond.

  • Probably the biggest challenge is actors, no matter how talented the actor is they don't have the capability of being in more than one place than one particular time, which is very vexing.

  • The guy who sits at the keyboard and types is so much smarter than I am. I think I got into writing so that I could spend as much time with that guy as possible.

  • The world's an angry place these days. Let's just not take it out on each other.

  • There should be nothing I can't live without.

  • Time away from thinking about something is as valuable - perhaps even more so - than directly thinking about it.

  • Time has a certain current to it, and it wants to flow in a certain direction.

  • When I first started writing, I had a very difficult time switching between projects, but now it's not only second-nature, it's indispensable: If I stall on one project, I can switch to another and stay productive.

  • When I write a film, the film gets handed off to a producer and a director and I go my merry way. With television, I am expected and contracted to stick around and actually produce what I've written.

  • You can save the city, but having the city be in jeopardy is one thing and having the people you care about be in jeopardy is another.

  • Your subconscious is always working in the background, unlocking things and solving problems.

  • I think when you do a season of television you go into it going I'd like the season premiere needs to be amazing. The season finale needs to be amazing.

+1
Share
Pin
Like
Send
Share