Quotes About Characters

You know, I have some issues. But I just love to play different characters all the time, and I try not to repeat myself too much.

I don't feel I'm playing villains all the time.

I'm fond of all my characters so every time one doesn't make the cut I'm a little disappointed although I understand it.

What is their potential for evil; what is their potential for wickedness? That's the only time that those characters become interesting to watch.

You see so many earnest characters in movies all the time, everyone has a purpose.

By the time I was a teenager, there wasn't a show I hadn't inhaled or a character I hadn't met.

I was very conscious of race as I was writing. I was lucky to have spent real time in Portuguese Africa, but I am white and my main characters are white, outsiders at sea in the "Dark Continent."

There are so many romantic comedies made, but very few dramas or love stories. And with a love story, you have to take time to develop three-dimensional characters.

Creating characters is like throwing together ingredients for a recipe. I take characteristics I like and dislike in real people I know, or know of, and use them to embellish and define characters.

I promptly said that life was a random series of beautifully composed vignettes, loosely tied together by a string of characters and time.

It's this simple law, which every writer knows, of taking two opposites and putting them in a room together. I love anything with Cartman and Butters at the same time, it's great.

Metaphorically speaking, I always make room for any evidence of scurvy in my characters, any mitigating ailments.

Children pay little attention to their parents' teachings, but reproduce their characters faithfully

Outside books, we avoid colorful characters.

Anna is the sort of woman who writers write about, Tom. Somewhere in the third act, women like her save characters like you and me from ourselves. She's the loveliest literary device in the world.

It is not accidental that the most unsympathetic characters in Austen's novels are those who are incapable of genuine dialogue with others. They rant. They lecture. They scold. This incapacity for true dialogue implies an incapacity for tolerance, self-reflection and empathy.

In fiction, every treachery and setback appears to serve some end: the characters learn and grow and come into their own. In life, it is not always clear that the hijacking of our plans is quite so provident or benign.

One can believe James's claim to an imagination of disaster; so many of his protagonists are unhappy in the end, and yet he gives them an aura of victory. It is because these characters depend on such high degree on their own sense of integrity that for them, victory has nothing to do with happiness. It has more to do with a settling within oneself, a movement inward that makes them whole.

She is a tyrant much in the way of a bad novelist, who shapes his characters according to his own ideology or desires and never allows them the space to become themselves.

A novel is not an allegory...it is a sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel; you inhale the experience. So start breathing. I just want you to remember this. That is all; class dismissed.

It is because these characters depend to such a high degree on their own sense of integrity that for them, victory has nothing to do with happiness. It has more to do with a settling within oneself, a movement inward that makes them whole.

These characters depend to such a high degree on their own sense of integrity that for them, victory has nothing to do with happiness. It has more to do with a settling within oneself, a movement inward that makes them whole. Their reward is not happiness...what James's characters gain is self-respect.

A good novel is one that shows complexity of individuals, and creates enough space for all those characters to have a voice, in this way a novel is called democratic - not that it advocates democracy but that by nature is is so.

A novel is not an allegory, I said as the period was about to come to an end. It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing. I just want you to remember this.