Characters In Books Quotes

Whether a character is good or evil depends on your perspective.

Steve Jones Snr

Vladimir stood next to one of the beams on the back porch of our new home, leaning on his back. He reached in his pocket and grabbed a pack of cigarettes, Marlboro Reds which were his favorites, and he lit one up. He was dressed all in black; black skinny jeans, black studded belt, black tennis shoes, black v neck shirt and he had the hood of his black jacket up over his head. He looked cool and collected, and somewhat villainous.” -Nina Jean Slack, Once Lost, Forever Found (Vol. #1)

Nina Jean Slack

It [the Harlem Renaissance] was a time of black individualism, a time marked by a vast array of characters whose uniqueness challenged the traditional inability of white Americans to differentiate between blacks.

Clement Alexander Price

The reality I submerse myself in when writing, is far greater than the physical reality surrounding me at work!

The worst part of writing is meeting all these great new characters and having no one to talk about (the adventures you share with) them.

You live like comfortable strangers. Like characters in a play.

Aryn Kyle

The best stories come from deep within us and are of us. Either our inner child comes out to play and makes all things possible, or we mold our characters and events from our own experiences, or our dreams of wanting to experience.

Perhaps this is what Henry James meant when he talked about the “irresponsibility” of characters. Characters are irresponsible, art is irresponsible when compared to life, because it is first and foremost important that a character be real, and as readers or watchers we tend to applaud any effort made towards the construction of that reality. We do not, of course, indulge actual people in the world this way at all. In real life, the fact that something seems real to someone is not enough to interest us, or to convince us that that reality is interesting. But the self-reality of fictional characters is deeply engrossing, which is why villains are lovable in literature in ways that they are not in life.

Experience-taking changes us by allowing us to merge our own lives with those of the characters we read about. It doesn’t happen all the time. It only occurs when people are able, in a sense, to forget about themselves and their own self-concept and self-identity while reading.You have to be able to take yourself out of the picture, and really lose yourself in the book in order to have this authentic experience of taking on a character’s identity.

My problem as a writer is that—whenever I meet someone for the first time—I immediately invent for them a personality and background that are invariably more interesting than the ones they possess. And confirming this character to be uninteresting after a few minutes of conversation, I decide that they are unnecessary to my story and begin devising ways to kill them off.

In the books I find the thrum of everything unsayable. The characters weep the way I want to, love the way I want to, cry, die, beat their breasts, and bray with life.

Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich