Marc Guggenheim Quotations

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I actually feel like comic book movies need to be better than your average movie.

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.

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.

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.'

What I took away from my 'Flashforward' experience is that when you're doing a serialized mythology show, you put your foot on the gas, and you do not take it off.

We're not militant, but there are certain things that are absolutely secret. There was a pilot printed on red paper, and I read everything on my iPad and have a scanner on my desk for these purposes. I scanned in the script, and red paper script scans in perfectly fine.

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 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.

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

With comics, there's no budget. There's a budget in terms of you have to pay an artist and a colorist and all that, but you can do anything you want to do.

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.

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.

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.

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.'

'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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

I noticed that 'Lost' had sort of worn out our welcome; because of 'Lost,' audiences were no longer being patient with slow reveals: they wanted answers quickly, and they wanted story to develop much faster.

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

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 do believe that even if you're the most clever person around and you figure out the 'whodunit' and you're not surprised - that shouldn't prevent you from enjoying the story.

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.

The goal, first and foremost, is to tell a satisfying - entertaining - story.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

There should be nothing I can't live without.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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