J. Michael Straczynski Quotes

No?” She picked up a jagged piece of glass. “Watch me.

Creation is built upon the promise of hope, that things will get better, that tomorrow will be better than the day before.

But it's not true. Cities collapse. Populations expand. Environments decay. People get ruder. You can't go to a movie without getting in a fight with the guy in the third row who won't shut up.

Filthy streets. Drive-by shootings. Irradiated corn. Permissible amounts of rat-droppings per hot dog. Bomb blasts, and body counts. Terror in the streets, on camera, in your living room. Aids and Ebola and Hepatitis B and you can't touch anyone because you're afraid you'll catch something besides love and nothing tastes as good anymore and Christopher Reeve is [dead] and love is statistically false.

Pocket nukes and subway anthrax. You grow up frustrated, you live confused, you age frightened, you die alone. Safe terrain moves from your city to your block to your yard to your home to your living room to the bedroom and all you want is to be allowed to live without somebody breaking in to steal your tv and shove an ice-pick in your ear.

That sound like a better world to you? That sound to you like a promise kept?

The quality of our thoughts is bordered on all sides by our facility with language.

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

The thing about denying someone their voice in this life is that it tends to come out in death.

G'Kar: I believe that when we leave a place, part of it goes with us and part of us remains. Go anywhere in the station when it is quiet, and just listen. After a while, you will hear the echoes of all our conversations, every thought and word we’ve exchanged. Long after we are gone, our voices will linger in these walls for as long as this place remains. But I will admit that the part of me that is going will very much miss the part of you that is staying.

Avoid the tyranny of the reasonable voice...it will guarantee a complacency of never trying anything adventurous...

1 Q: What do you get when you cross the Creative Artists Agency with a ham sandwich? A: A ham sandwich that never returns your freaking phone calls.

I'm delirious with joy. It proves that if you confront the universe with good intentions in your heart, it will reflect that and reward your intent. Usually. It just doesn't always do it in the way you expect.

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.

"Delenn: "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.

Whatever our history, whatever the root of our surnames, we remain a good and decent people, and we do not bow down and we do not give up. The fire of the human spirit cannot be quenched by bomb blasts or body counts. Cannot be intimidated forever into silence or drowned by tears. We have endured worse before. We will bear this burden and all that come hereafter because that's what ordinary men and women do. No matter what. This has not made us weaker. It has only made us stronger.

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.

He showed me that words can do more than tell stories, they can heal, and as long as you live inside the dignity of what you write, no one can take that away that what matters most. Those who hate you can kill you, but they cannot destroy you or the ideals that matter to you. To be decent writer you had to give yourself over to the power of words and a love of storytelling. (203)

A writer is without honor only in his or her own home, among his or her own family.