Quotes About Characters

I love it when talented actors can bring characters to life. Anybody who wears their feelings on their sleeve and has a harder, crusty shell - like I do - is definitely protecting an inner sensitivity.

When I was a young child and before he had left us for the U.S., my father would give me Mark Twain novels. In the characters, the weather and the context, my father must have seen many parallels to his own youth in the Caribbean in the 1930s and 40s.

The most difficult part of any crime novel is the plotting. It all begins simply enough, but soon you're dealing with a multitude of linked characters, strands, themes and red herrings - and you need to try to control these unruly elements and weave them into a pattern.

When you tell a story, there are imperatives of structure, of style, of pacing and all of this, that are there simply because you want to make it a good story. When do you introduce your characters? When do you put them onstage, when do you take them off the stage? How do you weave the different threads of the narrative together?

Writing historical novels can be dangerous. We need to be as accurate and as fair about the historical record as we can be, at the same time as creating our fictional characters and, hopefully, telling a good story. The challenge is weaving the fiction into the history.

I think if you make good, interesting content with compelling story lines and good characters, people will tune into the web for as long as you want them to.

For any film or any web show, the story dictates everything. If it is a good story, it obviously has good characters in it.

I play the role of a gangster's wife in a web series, a cop's wife in Hindi film 'Vodka Diaries,' a cop in 'Adangathey' and a gangster in 'Saaho.' So yeah, I have got all the roles covered.

I'm a huge fan of writing for people rather than writing and then trying to wedge people in. I'd love to know who the people are before I can write for them. For me, it's a much more organic way to create characters.

I like to take fictitious characters and circumstances and wedge them into a real world.

I wish I could act in films like Dev D' and A Wednesday.'

People have to respond to the characters and respond to the situations that they're in. That said, it still has to be a compelling narrative that drives along and keeps people coming back week after week. So really, with any successful show you could name, there has to be a mysterious blend of both of those.

My first book was on the grittier side of life. A week before being published, I realized all of my main characters come from single households. That was something that, when I lived in South Bronx, that's what it was like.

The hardest part about writing fiction is finding long stretches of time to do it: for me, this means writing mostly on Saturdays and Sundays. But I am always thinking about my characters, jotting down ideas in stolen moments and hoping I'll be able to make sense of them when the weekend rolls around.

Up until the age of 12, I went to dog shows every weekend. Mum showed beagles. It's a really competitive and eclectic world filled with characters who wear interesting outfits - similar to 'Toddlers & Tiaras,' but with dogs.

It's always fun to write the little bit of TV that the characters watch in 'Gravity Falls,' because it's a perfect place to poke fun at the media.

Polar' is based on the first and a little bit on the second book and all the characters from those novels are in there. The story is based on the graphic novel, but when it came to the execution of the film I felt I couldn't really make a movie without any dialogue.

The way I work: I pick a country. I learn the political history - I mean I really learn it; I read until it sinks in. Once I read the political history, I can project and find the clandestine history. And then I people it with the characters.

I have a huge note on my phone where things just start popping up. It doesn't make that much sense to me at the time, but once a song is finished, I can read into it and figure out who the characters are in my life.

I enjoy taking on complex, difficult characters and have always striven to capture the truth of those people, whether or not it's popular.

My father gave me an old Olympia portable when I was in fourth grade. Our ancestors came from Ireland. Our family stories of immigration helped me understand more about my characters in 'The Lemon Orchard.'

I love Sanjeev Kumar's cop portion in 'Sholay.' Manoj Bajpayee in 'Shool' was also amazing.

I do not think I will ever write screenplays based on my books. I would not know what to cut out and what portions to keep. I like all the characters I have created. I cannot imagine chopping them off.

I'm ashamed to say, I've done hideous pen portraits of people I don't like in my novels. And they'll say, 'Oh, that person was hideous,' and I'm nodding, and I'm thinking, 'It's you, you fool!'