Geoff Johns Quotes

My process seems to be unusual in the sense that I don't create worlds before characters. With me, character is king.

What I loved about romances was the character, and I think I still bring that to my novels. What romance taught me was that the 'who' will always matter more than the 'what.' It's fun to come up with plots, but I want to make sure the reader cares about who it's happening to.

Style is a form of expression! It's what makes your character your character, to put it in laymen's term.

There is no 'right' way to begin a novel, but for me, plot has to wait. The character comes first.

As a matter of writing philosophy, if there is one, I try not to ever plot a story. I try to write it from the character's point of view and see where it goes.

I always start with characters rather than with a plot, which many critics would say is very obvious from the lack of plot in my films - although I think they do have plots - but the plot is not of primary importance to me, the characters are.

The privilege, and the challenges, of taking on Black Widow have never been lost on me. I worked on the first 'Spiderman' game as well as 'Fantastic Four,' and I had always wanted to be able to tell more of a character-driven comic book story than was possible to fit into a game narrative.

I love sitcoms, and I grew up on sitcoms. That's my tasty junk food. So I wanted to create a sitcom and have some really quirky characters, because most of the stuff they make now is just so marginalized. How interesting is a white guy who's 28 years old and lives in New York? What story have we not seen about a character like that? Just as a writer, it's so much easier to come up with comedy when you have a really oppressed Indian boy. Or a mother who is an addict but still has to take care of her kids.

Certainly, from where I stand, I'm not a specialist in wildly different walks and voices. But I find as much variation and nuance as what satisfies me in what I do. So, I don't find this particularly different. He has his own peculiarities. You're probably talking about a cluster of Englishmen in suits but I've done quite a big cluster of guys not in suits as well, which I've occupied myself with. So, I don't find that this is the one that stands out.

Narratives are not fixed. We change our narratives for ourselves and we change them not necessarily deliberately. In other words, some people do, some people will constantly reconstruct their biography for external purposes, it's a very interesting political ploy.

If you asked me to write a rock song or a rap song, I couldn't do it because they're not in my fingers.

There’s an old writing rule that says ‘Don’t have two character names start with the same letter’, but I knew at the beginning that I was going to have more than 26 characters, so I was in trouble there. Ultimately it comes down to what sounds right. And I struggle with that, finding the right name for a character. If I can’t find the right name I don’t know who the character is and I can’t proceed.

I've tried to consider stories that I have read, making them into films, but they would turn out unnatural. If a producer wants that, he should call other people. Not me.

Even though Doctor Strange is an established character, when you're doing an origin story there's a lot of room for manoeuvre.

If faces were not alike, we could not distinguish men from beasts; if they were not different, we could not tell one man from another.

The great thing about fiction is that you can start off by telling the truth, then start making stuff up like crazy whenever you feel like it.

The most questionable thing I did was make Superman a government agent. If this had been a Superman story, I'd never have done that - and I know that, because I have a Superman story I want to tell someday. In this story, Batman was the hero, so the world was built around him.

Because a rose can never be a sunflower, and a sunflower can never be a rose.

There's always been this feedback between comics and films. But I think that if you take that analogy too far, if you only see comic books in terms of films, then eventually the best we can end up with is films that don't move. It would make us a poor relation to the movie industry.

[Producers] promised me they wouldn't do that sort of "defining nature of my character is that Laurel is Latina [in How to Get Away with Murder] ." It has nothing to do with that. She just happens to be a Latina.

I say the same thing about the death of James Wait. "Oh, well -- he wasn't going to write the Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway.

The fact is that the same sequence of days can arrange themselves into a number of different stories.

I would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one.

Each thing in its way, when true to its own character, is equally beautiful. (p 41)

When I'm trying to write a song for someone else, you can only see anything through your own eyes.