Quotes About Characters

I try to construct each of my novels around one central theme - core tensions shared by the characters.

Every story I write starts with a dilemma or a theme. Once I am convinced that this is the issue that is perturbing my thoughts, I start to look for characters capable of representing it.

We have a broad, well-positioned company, so when 'Minions' comes out, it can be in theme parks all over the world. We own Fandango. We can advertise on a network. We can have the characters pop up on the Golf Channel.

I'll say, 'I really like Daenerys,' and then I go, 'Wait, but I like the Stark theme, too, and I like the Lannister theme.' I keep jumping around. But I think that's kind of the beauty of 'Game of Thrones,' that there's so many different ones, and they're all kind of different, and they do different things.

I often do that with characters, going back to my bloody drama-school days, in terms of equating them with creatures. And it's very much there as a theme of all the seasons of 'Fargo' as well: the predator and the prey.

In all the background scores I do, I take care to see that the theme enriches the storyline and does not deviate from the mood of the scenes, context, characters and the entire movie.

The SF genre, of course, is really an organically evolved, marketplace-determined, idiosyncratic grab bag of themes and signifiers and characters and icons and gadgets, some of which hew to the realistic parameters and paradigms embraced by science, others of which partake more of fantasy and magic.

Once upon a time she had felt trapped inside her story with its familiar characters and predictable plot. Now she felt locked out of it.

Favoring 'resolution' the way we do, it is hard for us men to write great love stories. Why?, because we want to tell too much. We aren't satisfied unless at the end of the story the characters are lying there, panting.

Sade and Genet both achieved freedom by squeezing it out of their characters. If Apollinaire was right to describe Sade, who spent more than half his adult life in prison, as 'the most free spirit that ever lived', this is how he achieved freedom.

Of all the many novels set in the English Civil War that I have read, this was the one that described most perfectly the use of the different arms and the experience of the face of battle. It was also the one that made me care most about the characters.

Donna Leon. But she also liked history, so I handed over Jacqueline Winspear and John Banville. A little questioning changed the trajectory. I extolled Kate Atkinson and P. D. James, suggested Transcription. She mentioned liking Children of Men. I mentioned The Handmaid's Tale, which of course she had already read, then I catapulted over to my most special lady, Octavia Butler. One of my all-time favorite characters is bitter, angry, tender Lilith, who has lots of transcendent

Life is not like the game of chess. There are not only black and white pieces. There are gray figures, solitary knights, and equivocal characters who never get caught.

Who was Sancho Panza? Who was Don Abbondio? Yet they live eternally because—live germs as they were—they had the fortune to find a fecundating matrix, a fantasy which could raise and nourish them: make them live for ever!

O destino não é só dramaturgo, é também o seu próprio contra-regra, isto é, designa a entrada dos personagens em cena, dá-lhes as cartas e outros objetos, e executa dentro os sinais correspondentes ao diálogo, uma trovoada, um carro, um tiro.

I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.

They weren't impatient for the boys to turn into cartoons again. They awarded sympathy, gave compassion. Because deep down they had found parts of themselves in the characters. You said it George.

A writing teacher once told me that the most successful movies and books were simple plots about complex characters. You should be able to articulate your concept in a couple of lines.

Yet my friend Natasha [Troubetskoia]† swears that Dostoevsky was a great liar and you could hardly find a Nastasia, an "idiot," or a Stavrogin in Russia.

The resistance is the material, the events, the enigmas, the obscure motivations of the characters. Avoid grappling with these and you have a surface affair—a linear pattern, a solo melody in one key and monotonous and eventually exasperating. I ask myself, isn't it this precisely which gives a diary its essential character?

Characters in a novel or a play who act all the way through exactly as one expects them to... This consistency of theirs, which is held up to our admiration, is on the contrary the very thing which makes us recognise that they are artificially composed.

I do believe that characters in novels belong to their writers and their readers pretty equally. I've learned a lot of things about the characters I write from people who read about them. Readers expand them in ways I don't think of and take them to places I can't go.

You are going to love some of your characters, because they are you or some facet of you, and you are going to hate some of your characters for the same reason. But no matter what, you are probably going to have to let bad things happen to some of the characters you love or you won't have much of a story. Bad things happen to good characters, because our actions have consequences, and we do not all behave perfectly all the time.

Legolas is way cuter than Aragorn, and you know it.