J. Michael Straczynski Quotes

We all know to feel sympathy for those who've suffered from drug addiction, child abuse, and terminal illness, so the set up elicits an emotional response that the story itself very well may not earn. Energy generated by the fiction itself is likely to produce more light.

As long as I can make an audience feel something, I don't care whether it's a good thing or bad thing, just to feel something is important to me.

The first book you write because of the way it makes you feel. The second one you can't help but wonder how it's going to make the reader feel.

Wrestling and sports entertainment is not about the moves, it really isn't. It's about being able to evoke emotion in one facet or another.

My goal is to always try to make you feel something, whether that's humor or sadness or excitement, and to try to manipulate screen space.

My main goal as an actor, with my craft or whatever poncy way you want to say it, is to always take the audience with me. To make them feel for me, or to make them hate me, I want a reaction. I want their emotions. The worst reaction someone can have is, "eh."

I love to entertain, I love to make people laugh, cry, and move them, perhaps moving them in their lives.

The audience likes their emotions to be touched. They want to laugh and cry and feel good.

On stage, it is a tremendous thing to be able to make people laugh. But one of the things that I have always loved is when I am in shows where you can turn the audience upside down and make them cry or move them. That is when things are the most rewarding.

People don't come out for book events. They want to feel an emotion and be entertained.

A film with an untidy plot cannot grip the audience and define their emotional response.

I think the last thing you want to do as a writer, as a storyteller, is to create indifference. I don't necessarily go out of my way to provoke, but I would much rather have a song that triggers a whole myriad of reactions than a song that inspires a shrug of the shoulder.

When I'm sitting writing, I know that something works if I've made myself cry, or laugh, or have a visceral emotion.

To me, art's highest purpose is to entertain, to enlighten, to inspire, to evoke emotion and to change an audience in some way, big or small.

You can get swept away by a musical, but real tears are rare.

I think writers like to see how people bring their words to life, and it's always surprising. Always, no matter what, whether it's good or bad, it's always surprising because a whole human being is coming to that piece of writing.

The reason I'm an actor and am trying to make my way in drama is to move people, to affect people, to gain a response - so these people who come up to you in the street are your audience.

What I've realized is that a film operates both on the intellectual and emotional levels, and if you can find a way to tell a riveting story and draw ideas out of that, it's very powerful.

I just want to make art that connects with people and moves them on an emotional level. Any time I can put out music and place a story behind it and have people watch it and go, 'Wow, I was affected by that,' to me, feels like I've done my job.

The prime goal of an author is the same as a musician, which is to emotionally connect with the reader in some way or another.

The word war itself has a kind of glazing abstraction to it that conjures up bombs and bullets and so on, whereas my goal is to try to, so much as I can, capture the heart and the stomach and the back of the throat of readers who can lie in bed at night and participate in a story.

I go to great lengths to make certain situations feel right to the reader.

There isn't any art until some creature sees and consumes it. And has a reaction.

I don't know why people are so surprised by my live performances. My approach is so simple; every song I sing, every story I tell, every move I make, must move the audience to laughter, tears or inspiration. Otherwise, why should I do it?

It's like fiction - the fact that somebody's telling you a story about people who didn't exist doesn't make the experience of the story any less real in your heart and mind. You go through heavy emotional responses to these stories, and wrestling is a similar thing - but it's happening in real space.