Quotes About Characters

I want to spend my time exploring the characters we've already got here. I want to give them more time to shine before the team gets to have 400 members.

I find that, maybe because I'm also a singer, I hear music in characters all the time, even if they don't sing. I hear what affects me in my heart.

Jane Austen may not be the best writer, but she certainly writes about the best people. And by that I mean people just like me.

Like so many of the other books I read, it never seemed to me like a book, but like a place I had lived in, had visited and would visit again, just as all the people in them, every blessed one – Anne of Green Gables, Heidi, Jay Gatsby, Elizabeth Bennet, Scarlet O'Hara, Dill and Scout, Miss Marple, and Hercule Poirot – were more real than the real people I knew.

All of reading is really only finding ways to name ourselves, and, perhaps, to name the others around us so that they will no longer seem like strangers. Crusoe and Friday. Ishmael and Ahab. Daisy and Gatsby. Pip and Estella. Me. Me. Me. I am not alone. I am surrounded by words that tell me who I am, why I feel what I feel.

Over and over I feel as if my characters know who they are, and what happens to them, and where they have been and where they will go, and what they are capable of doing, but they need me to write it down for them because their handwriting is so bad.

Find out what each character cares most in the world because then you will have discovered what's at stake.

Some characters in fiction and our families exist as levers, to turn everything upside down and thereby knock out of the park some of our old presumptions, pretensions, convictions, and illusions of safety. These people, both in fiction and at the holiday table, tend to be annoying and on the margins.

There is a real skill to hearing all those words that real people—and your characters—say and to recording what you have heard—and the latter is or should be more interesting and concise and even more true than what was actually said.

I know I set out to tell you every single thing I know about writing, but I am also going to tell you every single thing I know about school lunches, partly because the longings and dynamics and anxieties are so similar. I think this will also show how taking short assignments and then producing really shitty first drafts of these assignments can yield a bounty of detailed memory, raw material, and strange characters lurking in the shadows.

To my earlier self I would like to say, "Relax. The story will come in due time. Trust your characters. Let them tell you what happens next.

Novelists are evil psychopomps, basically. We treat a few characters as real, but the rest of them are cannon fodder.

I love the way that each book -- any book -- is its own journey. You open it, and off you go. You are changed in some way, large or small, by having traveled with those characters.

Are we not all a thousand characters in millions of plays throughout our lifetime?

I'm infinitely more involved in the reality of the characters and their situation than I am in everyday life.

I have a lot of people in my life who are truly ridiculous characters, and they're very, very funny people, but they don't really try to be. They're not cracking jokes.

We referenced fictional characters as if they were people to learn from. As if real-life people were too nebulous, too private and unreal for us to understand.

I was always attracted to characters that were in some level of turmoil or suffering because I had so much of that in my own life and I wanted to channel it. I was always into darker things.

It's hard to know whether certain characters come to life or not, they either come to have their own life or they don't. I've written many things in which the characters just remain inert.

I think having my life be as private and quiet as possible is a way in which then I can go and play characters.

I am drawn to characters that go on journeys, characters that are real people, that have life.

I believe you can only draw from your own life as an actor. All the characters I've played, I only have my infinite eye and the presence of my life to take from.

This is one of the cruelties of the theatre of life; we all think of ourselves as stars and rarely recognize it when we are indeed mere supporting characters or even supernumeraries.

Respect the way characters may change once they've got 50 pages of life in them. Revisit your plan at this stage and see whether certain things have to be altered to take account of these changes.