Top 120 J. Michael Straczynski Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “I have friends in different parts of the world, and they’ll all go online at the same time and all pull up a movie and hit play, at the same moment, and then they’ll comment to each other about it. They’re sharing an experience, even though they’re on different parts of the planet.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

52. “When you walk into a movie theater, you don’t walk out half-way through, and then come back the next day to watch the rest of it.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

53. “I like to consider my mind an open door. It’s just not a revolving door.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

54. “People in a cluster are bound to each other automatically, and can see each other automatically.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

55. “If sacred places are spared the ravages of war... then make all places sacred. And if the holy people are to be kept harmless from war... then make all people holy.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

56. “We are in a tech-heavy society, plunging headlong into an unknown future. Science fiction is what allows you to stand back and analyze the impact of that and put it in context of how it affects people.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

57. “My house looks like it was decorated by a 14-year old with a platinum American Express card.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

58. “It’s really important to me to keep growing as a writer, to look for new challenges and be harshly critical of my own work in order to learn and tell better stories.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

59. “A changeling is one child substituted for another. I couldn’t find anything more apt. We had to kind of fight that supernatural element in the publicity, and I offered to try and find another title, but Clint liked it, and it stayed.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

60. “Sometimes you can’t see what the problem is until you go close, until you look deep inside. It’s when you look beyond the edge of what you think you know that you can finally arrive at the truth.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

61. “No greater love hath a man than he lay down his life for his brother. Not for millions, not for glory, not for fame. For one person, in the dark where no one will ever know or see.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

62. “I keep waiting for a paradigm shift to happen that will let network and studio execs see that sci-fi is the same as any other genre in terms of how you approach it – logically, character-based, with challenging ideas and forward thinking – but I worry that it might never happen in my lifetime.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

63. “When it comes down to it, the reason that science fiction endures is that it is, at its core, an optimistic genre. What it says at the end of the day is that there is a tomorrow, we do go on, we don’t extinguish ourselves and leave the planet to the cockroaches.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

64. “Budget grows out of the story. If you’re writing a story with people caught in an elevator for most of the film, you’re pretty sure it won’t be a $200 million movie.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

65. “You can’t just pick up a gun and become a gunfighter, or go off and explore for a new world, or pull a sword out of a stone, or rescue a damsel in distress, or – so we play games and we read books because the world isn’t the world we thought we were supposed to get, the world we thought we’d been promised by somebody. Because things didn’t turn out the way they were supposed to. So we go someplace else.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

66. “Every time I got ‘Amazing Spider-Man’ or ‘Fantastic Four’ or another book firmly on the rails, we got pulled into some big event book or crossover and it cost momentum and messed badly with the pacing and structure of the book.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

67. “Like everyone else, I am going to die. But the words – the words live on for as long as there are readers to see them, audiences to hear them. It is immortality by proxy. It is not really a bad deal, all things considered.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

68. “I sometimes find reality far more fantastical and unlikely than what I could just make up.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

69. “I’m all for teaching creation and allowing prayers in schools, as soon as scholars begin teaching Darwinism and geometry in church.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

70. “To understand this whole area, you have to stop thinking like a viewer and start thinking like a network programming exec.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

71. “I used to wonder which would be harder: having no one to believe in you or someone who believes in you so much that their love could burn you to the ground. Someone who knows you can give more than you think you can. Not just love. Ferocity.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

72. “I am a control freak. I will admit that freely.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

73. “I’ve written for every medium except poetry, at which I suck.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

74. “When you’re writing a story in bits and pieces, month in and month out, there really isn’t time or space for reflection, no room to learn what those scripts had to teach you.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

75. “Whenever you can bring your chops in as a reporter to unearth a cool story, that’s always a good thing.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

76. “I am a huge zombie fan. I have probably seen the George Romero movies 100 times each, without exaggeration.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

77. “All you can do is focus on telling the best story you can with compelling characters. If you do it right, it will endure. If you do it wrong, it won’t.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

78. “On most TV shows, you work on a set and do some location.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

79. “The American Way is an amalgam of our compassion, our strengths, our failings and our attempts to build a better world, a more perfect union.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

80. “Find what scares you and do it.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

81. “A lot of the futuristic space stuff seemed to me to be a very cool form of science-fiction, so that was my first real baptism in the genre.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

82. “A lot of television tends to assume that audiences don’t have the attention span or the IQ to follow a lot of stuff.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

83. “I have to move fast, if I hesitate even a second longer, I’ll lose focus and be trapped forever in this... this... toilet!”

— J. Michael Straczynski

84. “Never follow somebody else’s path; it doesn’t work the same way twice for anyone... the path follows you and rolls up behind you as you walk, forcing the next person to find their own way.“”... If you do not choose to lead, you will forever be led by others. Find what scares you, and do it. And you can make a difference, if you choose to do so.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

85. “I grew up on comics and cartoons. So, as an adult, I like comics and cartoons.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

86. “Dead people are infinities of maybes.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

87. “Everyone in the entertainment business gets crappy contracts when we start out, and into the middle of our careers. It’s the nature of the business.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

88. “I was very clear that I wanted to keep ‘Thor’ out of the rest of the Marvel universe for no less than the first six issues. And the success of the book, I think, speaks well to that decision.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

89. “There are people in life, who show you how to live. There are people in life, who show you how to die.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

90. “The whole point of having great characters is the opportunity to explore them more deeply with time, re-interpreting them for each new age.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

91. “The universe considers me its personal cat toy.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

92. “I’ve always been kind of a mutt creatively. I started off in journalism, and I’ve actually done more police and procedural shows than I’ve ever done science fiction shows. I was on ‘Murder She Wrote,’ I was on ‘Walker, Texas Ranger,’ I was on ‘Jake and the Fat Man.’”

— J. Michael Straczynski

93. “I don’t need to write comics for a living. I have movies and TV for that. I write comics for one reason and one reason only: I love comics. I love the form, the structure, the storytelling process, I love everything about it.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

94. “On a certain level, I don’t think there is an answer to what the American way is, because it is constantly being re-defined. It’s also been exploited and capitalized upon and politicized by one side or the other to the point that a certain degree of cynicism has attached itself to that term.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

95. “Sometimes the pain they wish to spare is their own because if you can be convinced to set aside your own dreams, they can remain comfortable with their decision to do the same.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

96. “The only thing that I discovered very early on is that, even though we might change schools and cities and towns and states, the books in the library were the same. They had the same covers. They had the same characters. I could go and visit those people in the library as if I knew them.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

97. “If we cannot win, we can at least deprive them of the victory.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

98. “I’ve worked on high visibility shows that weren’t always the best, and low visibility shows that I love but that didn’t have the PR behind them.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

99. “We know that if memory is destroyed in one part of the brain, it can be sometimes re-created on a different part of the brain. And once we can unravel that amino chain of chemicals that is responsible for memory, I see no reason why we can’t unlock it and, essentially, wipe out what’s there.”

— J. Michael Straczynski

100. “Superhero stories are kind of in my DNA from childhood on, so I think I’m genetically drawn to playing in the genre when the opportunity presents itself.”

— J. Michael Straczynski