J. Michael Straczynski Quotes

TV isn't a wide medium when it comes to boldness on the small screen because of the audience. It reaches out to the audience but keeping the traditions intact.

What I feel is there are certain demands that you have to satisfy in any piece of writing. When it's just for me, it's just for me, but if it's a piece for a particular publication, I know what they're going to ask for.

There are things I'm doing with 'The After' that would've never flown on 'The X-Files' and on network television, so it's more permissive. That's not to say that you want to abuse that. I think that a show like 'The X-Files' actually worked better as a network show with the restraints put on it, the censorship that was applied.

I think there are certain subjects I don't want to tackle, that I don't think I could do a good job with. I don't think I'd be good with... broad comedy? I don't know. Maybe I would.

It's hard to write when you think every sentence is going to be read by a million kids.

You have to shelve a lot of your inspiration. There's only so much you can do with one record.

When you're writing for newspapers you have all these parameters. You can't swear, you have to use short paragraphs, all that. If you stay within those parameters, you have lots of freedom because you're writing for the next day.

As a linguist, I see the arbitrariness of strictures editors force on me as a writer.

No one who cannot limit himself has ever been able to write.

What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.

What I hated was doing what somebody in LA thought Jeff Foxworthy ought to do.

I write R-rated action dramas, and every year that goes by, that gets to be a smaller and smaller world you have to work in. You have to think of how to get the studio excited and sell them something.

In order to understand what they need to understand, in order to write what they write, they have to be free. And yet, they aren't ever free. They are not free because they are not free of the constrictions their art puts on them.

The problem with being an actor is that you have to be reactive to what other people want.

The reality of the writer's world is that you set yourself up for future disappointment with every success that you deliver because you end up raising your audience's expectations.

I don't like to think of my readership as 'fans,' a word which has always suggested a kind of power relationship I'm uncomfortable with.

One thing that worried me was how writers get categorized and so they end up having to write the same kind of book again and again. That is fine if it is what you want to do, but I would rather be locked in the trunk of my car with a weasel than write the same book every three years until I die.

I do outlines when I'm writing with someone, but they also need to have a certain amount of freedom.

I like the boundaries, the kinds of conventions of a documentary and having to work within that.

There are certain things I couldn't write because they're not intrinsic to my beliefs. For instance, I couldn't write a hero or heroine who didn't put children first.

You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it to the page. The page is jealous and tyrannical; the page is made of time and matter; the page always wins.

Write on any subject you choose. There are no taboos except what is prohibited by law and press ethics.

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and the rest of it.

Network TV is so limiting. There are so many parameters.

I enjoy writing but I wouldn't want to do it all the time because generally you are not writing about things you want to write about.