Marc Guggenheim Quotes

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.

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.

The term 'Consulting Producer' is extraordinarily nebulous in TV, and it really means something different depending on the show and the specific circumstances negotiated.

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

I happen to like dark, and I like the fact that 'Arrow' is a pretty dark show, particularly for a network show.

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.

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

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.

Everything is always on the table. I think it's one of the things that's made 'Arrow' special. But we also all collectively feel like 'The Flash' needs to stand on its own two feet, now that it's gotten its launch from 'Arrow.'

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.

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.

The one thing that's always very safe to say with 'Arrow' is never make assumptions.

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.

All of the stuff I can't afford to do on a TV budget, I just put into the comic book because you're really only limited in a comic by your artist's imagination.

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

The first half of my TV career, I didn't do any genre at all.

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.

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.

In DC Comics, Blue Devil is a superhero who came out of a movie.

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.

One of the things I do well - I think, anyway - is combining different tones.

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.

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.

Obviously, I love superheroes; I love comic book characters, but I ... I guess I've had a lifelong affection for comics, and while I love the characters so much, I also love the medium.

That's one of the perks of my job, is getting to see what the Internet does.

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.

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

One of things we say on 'Arrow' is, 'The only constant is evolution.'

Collider is a company that I formed with a movie producer, Alisa Tager, and we just wanted to create a place where writers could come and develop their ideas without a regard to limitations of form.

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?

We've enjoyed laying the foundation for 'The Flash' series.

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

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.

Time management is really key for me.

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

As always, things happen sooner rather than later on 'Arrow.'

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.

One of the great things about the 'Arrow' crew is that no one is settling for what they did yesterday. They're always thinking about what they can do tomorrow.

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.

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.

'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 am not going to kill you. First I'm going to beat on you for a few hours.
Then I might move on to the cutting.

Doc Savage, Indiana Jones, Flash Gordon ... these were the kinds of characters I was thinking about as I was developing Jonas Quantum because there aren't that many brand new characters being introduced anymore.

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.

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.

Sooner or later, we all go through a crucible. I'm guessing your's was that island. Most believe there are two types of people who go into a crucible: the ones who grow stronger from the experience and survive it, and the ones who die. But there's a third type: the ones who learn to love the fire. They chose to stay in their crucible because it's easier to embrace the pain when it's all you know anymore,