Quotes About Characters

we read fiction to satisfy a more basic need—to imagine our way into other lives, to explore characters and situations that tell us something new about the world, and maybe about ourselves, or to remind us of something important that we may have forgotten.

This extraordinary story you hold in your hands was specifically intended as "an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial.

I must confess, though, that I sometimes lose interest in the characters and get much more interested in the trees and animals. I think I exercise tremendous restraint in this, but my editor says, 'Would you stop this beauty business.' And I say, 'Wait, wait until I tell you about these ants.

Originally, Sula opened with 'Except for World War II, nothing interfered with National Suicide Day.' With some encouragement I recognized that sentence as a false beginning." Falseness, in this case, meant abrupt. There was no lobby, as it were, where the reader could be situated before being introduced to the goings-on of the characters.

The novel, I believe, allows, encourages ways to experience the public – in time, with affect, in a communal space, with other people (characters), and in language that insists on individual participation. It also tries to illuminate and recover the relationship between literature and public life.

That's what acting is - it's about... having the courage to allow your audience into the private moments of your characters' lives.

Over the years, I've been trying to build a relationship with an audience. I've tried to maintain as much of a low profile as I could so that those characters would emerge and their relationship with audiences would be protected.

Books are the mile markers of my life. Some people have family photos or home movies to record their past. I've got books. Characters. For as long as I can remember, books have been my safe place. I read about places I can barely imagine and lose myself in journeys to foreign lands to save girls who didn't know they were really princesses.

One of the things I really love about TV is this symbiotic relationship you can get between the writers and the actors, and the characters start to come to life because you start to collaborate.

J-"Don't tell me you don't feel a true connection to the characters in your favorite books". A-"That is true, Pen. Just because they aren't real people doesn't make characters less...real".

I love making up stories. I love getting lost in other worlds and being with other characters. I love the way I think I'm in control and then the characters and stories take on a life of their own. I love how I can incorporate my own faith into the stories I write. Writing is both discovery and creating and with each book I do that. Discover and create. It can be an adventure some days, a nightmare others. I also like that I can do this wearing ugly clothes.

standing there beside this king, Han Solo and all the other characters he would eventually play seeded in him now. And then there was me, pregnant with all those people I would play: a vengeful hairdresser, a hostile mother-in-law, a flute-playing adulteress, a psychologist, a drug-addicted writer, a boyfriend-poaching actress, a boy-hungry casting director, myself, an unfaithful wife, an angry boss, myself, myself, myself, myself, and a couple of nuns.

I tend to play strong characters and people just assume that I would want to play romantic comedies, which I would love to do, but there are other women that do it so great and they maybe couldn't do what I do, play the kind of characters that I play.

I've been killing characters my entire career, maybe I'm just a bloody minded bastard, I don't know, [but] when my characters are in danger, I want you to be afraid to turn the page (and to do that) you need to show right from the beginning that you're playing for keeps.

Just as you grieve if a friend is killed, you should grieve if a fictional character is killed. You should care. If somebody dies and you just go get more popcorn, it's a superficial experience isn't it?

You should grieve if a fictional character is killed. You should care.

States are as the men are; they grow out of human characters.

Eve had privately dubbed them Moe, Larry, and Curly.

God, he even knew their names. Rhage. Phury. And that scary-ass Zsadist guy. Yeah, no Tom, Dick, and Harry names for the vampire types. But come on, could you actually imagine some lethal bloodsucker named Howard? Eugene?

There is a kind of dreary monotony about there characters, an American sameness about them that never varies and is always dull.

We got off the bus at Main Street, which was no different from where you get off a bus in Kansas City or Chicago or Boston—red brick, dirty, characters drifting by, trolleys grating in the hopeless dawn, the whorey smell of a big city.

We wandered around, carrying our bundles of rags in the narrow romantic streets. Everybody looked like a broken-down movie extra, a withered starlet; disenchanted stunt-men, midget auto-racers, poignant California characters with their end-of-the-continent sadness, handsome, decadent, Casanova-ish men, puffy-eyed motel blondes, hustlers, pimps, whores, masseurs, bellhops—a lemon lot, and how's a man going to make a living with a gang like that?

My agent and I try to be picky with roles so that I can drive my career in different directions and be different, creative characters. I want to be an actor for the rest of my life and to have fun with my career. So I told him that I wish I could do a movie that already has a fan base. And then 'Twilight' came along!

I always say that characters must drive plots, never the reverse. Writing about large-scale events creates the risk that the scope of the events themselves can overwhelm the characters. I emphatically do not want that. That was the only trepidation I felt when I started 'The Twilight War.'