J. Michael Straczynski Quotes

I began my writing life as a poet, so poetry has always been fundamental. I evolved from poetry to journalism to stories to novels. But poetry was always there.

Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.

Poetry, I think, intensifies the reader's experience. If it's a humorous facet of the story, poetry makes it more exuberant. If it's a sad facet, poetry can make it more poignant.

Prose is all about embellishing and describing.

All which is not prose is verse; and all which is not verse is prose.

I must say, when I reread myself, it's the poetry I tend to look at. It's the most exciting to write, and it's over the quickest.

I would not be able to pen an academic and dry diatribe. I have too much talent for that.

Poetry is one of the few nasty childhood habits I've managed to grow out of.

But I can't and don't ever want to write bell-yanking confetti-tossing hat-throwing poems.

I'm not a 'long writer' and have never wanted to write a novel or even a novella. Poetry, like flash fiction, provides a readily accessible canvas to play with. Whether to express an emotion or share a vignette, these forms are often interchangeable.

Let my life as Poet begin. I want the life of the Poet. I have labored for over twelve years, one thousand pages of prose. Now, I want the easiness of poetry. The brevity of the poem.

Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.

Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.

On the subject of literary genres, I've always felt that my response to poetry is inadequate. I'd love to be the kind of person that drifts off into the garden with a slim volume of Elizabethan verse or a sheaf of haikus, but my passion is story.

There are still many tribal cultures where poetry and song, there is just one word for them. There are other cultures with literacy where poetry and song are distinguished. But poetry always remembers that it has its origins in music.

A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is a joke.

Without poetry, stories would be told in sepia.

I hear a little firecracker go off when you come up with a good rhyme.

Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral.

My strong suits, coming from poetry, will naturally be description, which I love doing. It comes very easily, and possibly structure, up to a point.

Poetry: the best words in the best order.

I have no very sophisticated understanding of literary forms. Short stories are shorter than novels, and poems are typically shorter than either, though not always.

I can make rhymes. My style of writing is kind of childlike anyway.

I write the occasional poem. I think my dabbling in poetry makes me better at screenplays. Poetry teaches the value of condensing, the importance of talking in a few words.

When I first began writing, it was not in screenwriting but in poetry. That form was so evocative, all about the image and the emotion captured in a Polaroid-like smattering of words.