J. Michael Straczynski
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.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Play
You can only have one voice on set, and that has to be the director.Collection: Voice
On most TV shows, you work on a set and do some location.Collection: Tv Shows
Science fiction shows are traditionally about the gimmick or the gadget and tend to be emotionally cool to the touch.Collection: Gimmicks
You can't always relate to the big action things, but you can relate to small moments.Collection: Small Moments
People in a cluster are bound to each other automatically, and can see each other automatically.Collection: People
A lot of television tends to assume that audiences don't have the attention span or the IQ to follow a lot of stuff.Collection: Stuff
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.Collection: Next Day
I'm all for crossovers if they benefit the individual books.Collection: Book
I think for any writer, creating and controlling your own property is the ultimate dream.Collection: Dream
I want to have time. When you're doing a monthly book, you're like a man racing after a bus. You're breathless and red-faced. I want to build in quality control.Collection: Book
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.Collection: War
If there’s any other message in this to readers, it’s in these two characters as icons of hope, that it doesn’t make any difference where you come from, or where you went to school, or who you are, there’s hope. That a kid from Jersey with Superman as the icon that kept him alive for years would one day end up writing the character is as absoutely unlikely as it is utterly inevitable. And if that’s true for me, it’s true for you, if you follow your dreams and your passions in full flight. Don’t give up. No Limits. It’s never too late to learn to fly.Collection: Dream
The more important the emotion is, the fewer words required to express it: Will you go out with me? I think I like you. I care for you. I love you. Marry me. Goodbye.Collection: Goodbye
I like to consider my mind an open door. It's just not a revolving door.Collection: Doors
The sky was full of stars, and every star an exploding ship.Collection: Stars
When the Seinfeld show said it was going to be a show about nothing, everybody said it couldn't - wouldn't work. It did. Thor is about something, about that character finding his destiny, but it's not doing what was expected... and yet it's doing very well.Collection: Character
There are people in life, who show you how to live. There are people in life, who show you how to die.Collection: Life
Did Alan Moore get screwed on his contract? Of course. Lots of people get screwed, but we still have Spider-Man and lots of other heroes.Collection: Hero
I've changed my mind. I've decided that at the end I want to be cremated and my ashes scattered over someone I don't like.Collection: Mind
I'm sorry, but anyone who thinks the use of an angelic (or seemingly angelic character), whose likes have been written about for, oh, about 4,000 years, is ripping off Star Trek, has his head so thoroughly up his ass as to have blipped into an entirely new intestinally-based reality and desperately needs to get a wider frame of reference.Collection: Stars
Faith and reason are the shoes on your feet. You can travel further with both than you can with just one.Collection: Shoes
We are dreamers, shapers, singers, and makers. We study the mysteries of laser and circuit, crystal and scanner, holographic demons and invocations of equations. These are the tools we employ, and we know many things.Collection: Art
The universe considers me its personal cat toy.Collection: Cat
We all are big believers in the notion that as a species we are better together than we are apart, that the common core of our shared humanity is stronger than that which seeks to marginalize us and factualize us and turn us against each other.Collection: Humanity
You don't buy into huge car chases or sensates or interstellar warfare, but you can buy into a loving relationship or a father-son relationship, and you can buy into the small humor. If you want to make your fiction universal, go small. That's the best way to do it.Collection: Father
Captain John Sheridan: I wish I had your faith in the universe. I just don't see it. Delenn: Then I will tell you a great secret, Captain. Perhaps the greatest of them all. The molecules of your body are the same molecules that make up this station , and the nebula outside, that burn inside the stars themselves. We are starstuff. We are the universe made manifest, trying to figure itself out. And as we have both learned, sometimes the universe requires a change of perspective.Collection: Stars
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.Collection: Writing
When in doubt, blow something up.Collection: Funny
Greatness is never appreciated in youth, called pride in midlife, dismissed in old age, and reconsidered in death. Because we cannot tolerate greatness in our midst, we do all we can do destroy it.Collection: Appreciation
We walk in dark places no others will enter. We stand on the bridge and no one may pass. We live for the One. We die for the One. -- the Ranger oathCollection: Dark
There can always be new beginnings... even for people like us.Collection: New Beginnings
Half-way through any big project, everyone forgets what they're doing.Collection: Way
It is imperative for many branches of fundamentalist christianity to constantly feel conspired against...so they cite humanist manifestos and theosophical societies and concoct these vast and dark organizations that exist nowhere but in the minds of those who conceive these theories.Collection: Dark
The hardest thing in the world is to stand alone. Your friends will not understand, will resent you, will want you to just stop it and let life go back to where it was. But you have to follow the quiet turning of your own considered conscience. It's a hard road.Collection: Resent You
Stun settings are for people who can't commit.Collection: People
What are the purposes and priorities of teaching? . . . First, to inspire. Second, to challenge. Third, and only third, to impart information.Collection: Teaching
No dictator, no invader, can hold an imprisoned population by force of arms forever. There is no greater power in the universe than the need for freedom. Against that power, governments and tyrants and armies cannot stand. The Centauri learned this lesson once. We will teach it to them again. Though it take a thousand years, we will be free.Collection: Freedom
It was the dawn of the third age of mankind.Collection: War
It's been amazing to watch, because for Thor, which was always a mid-selling book, to be in the top ten for every single issue since the reboot is just a great compliment.Collection: Book
Find what scares you and do it.Collection: Scare
If every violent program in the nation were blipped off the air for 48 hours, and replaced by reruns of the 'Donna Reed Show', there would not be one less death in South Central LA. At most you'd have several more incidents of people shooting out their TVs.Collection: Air
At its heartmeat core, writing is about exploring the questions of your heart on the assumption that what intrigues you, what inflames or amuses or ennobles you, will have the same effect on someone else. It's about taking chances, and taking risks, and pushing yourself to be honest in the issues that present themselves.Collection: Heart
To understand this whole area, you have to stop thinking like a viewer and start thinking like a network programming exec.Collection: Thinking
Never follow somebody else's path; it doesn't work the same way twice for anyone.Collection: Way
A good story should provoke discussion, debate, argument...and the occasional bar fight.Collection: Fighting
Here's the miracle: I grew up thinking, 'Wouldn't it be great to write 'Superman' someday? Wouldn't it be great to create my own show, or work on 'Lensman,' or 'Forbidden Planet?'' Those were very literally the goals I set for myself, the dreams that I thought I didn't have a chance in hell of ever actually achieving. But it's happened.Collection: Dream