Quotes About Character

To devise situation where the protagonist is force to tell a lie, a useful figure for the writer is the Devil. Like the Devil, the author actively searches for flaws in a protagonist's character and seeks to exploit these flaws...As an author, your job is to find ways of exposing the lies of your protagonist.

Does the protagonist deny the irreconcilable conflict? Does she lie about it- to herself and others? Does she make a choice between two irreconcilable desires? Then clearly her choice of one over the other reveals something essential about her that was not apparent at the beginning of the story. The protagonist-sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously- must reckon then with a new understanding of her character and who she really is and her place in and relationship to the world.

It was nice to find out, then, that if one is characterologically incapable of not being a total fuckface, science has not shown you will die any sooner . People might just be gladder when you eventually do.

Talent is part of the equation, but when you combine talent with accountability and authenticity, it is tough to beat.

As bad a dresser as I am, anything beats being judged by my character.

I thought the president-elect's identity as a despicable human being was something we could all agree on.

What you call your personality, you know?—it's not the actual bones, or teeth, something solid. It's more like a flame. A flame can be upright, and a flame can flicker in the wind, a flame can be extinguished so there's no sign of it, like it had never been.

She looked to me like a librarian is supposed to, slightly stern, with a longer-than-average neck.

Just do the right thing." The simplicity is so removed from my own generation of helicopter parents.

Courtesy seldom costs anything, and the willingness to extend it can be its own subtle declaration of strength. There

I do not tell you that those who turn to betrayal, to theft, to murder and treason, do so only because they are good men who have been led astray. I tell you only that all men begin as good men. What they are taught as children, what is expected of them as young men, is either the armor about that goodness or the flaw that allows evil in.

The artist who really loves people loves them so well the way they are he sees no need to disguise their characteristics-he loves them whole, without retouching. Yet the word used for this unqualifying affection is 'cynicism'.

If God is an author and the universe is the biggest novel ever written, I may feel as if I'm the lead character in the story, but like every man and woman on Earth, I am a suporting player in one of billions of subplots. You know what happens to supporting players. Too often they are killed off in chapter 3, or in chapter 10, or in chapter 35. A supporting player always has to be looking over his shoulder.

Readers will stay with an author, no matter what the variations in style and genre, as long as they get that sense of story, of character, of empathetic involvement.

If you can spend enough time playing other people, you don't have to think too much about your own character motivations.

If a man is a beast, he's a beast in his heart, and that's not the kind of heart that beats in you.

I underestimated her. I under-estimated her grit. She

It ain't the heat, it's the humility.

But you are what you do, not what you say you are.

The idea of forming people out of grammatical clauses seems so fantastical at the start that you hide your terror in a smokescreen of elaborate sentence making, as if character can be drawn forcibly out of the curlicues of certain adjectives piled ruthlessly on top of one another. In fact, character occurs with the lightest of brushstrokes. Naturally, it can be destroyed lightly too.

C]haracter occurs with the lightest of brushstrokes. Naturally, it can be destroyed lightly, too.

We have different ideas about things. Specifically we have different ideas about what a person is, or should be.

When everyone is determined to present someone as a monster, there are two possibilities: either he is a saint or they are not telling the whole story.

Once he had said to her that a man should never be judged by the result of his labors, but by the nature of his effort.