Characters Quotes

T[he rules of writing] require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.

Mark Twain

One of the key secrets of great writing is knowing where to start and when to stop.

Chloe Thurlow

No writing is effortless. I’m not saying you can’t have a good day where the words just kind of flow, but even those words have to be edited. Probably more than once. And I’m not saying a character hasn’t somehow gone in a different direction that I wanted her to go, but that was me, not her. I let her get away from me. I let her roam free and nine times out of ten, the result is not good. I have to go back and start over because she veered off the path of my book. She changed the vision. And I did that. Not her.

Darynda Jones

...you mean you don't fit characters into a plot? excatly...

John Geddes

A Dickens character to me is a theatrical projection of a character. Not that it isn't real. It's real, but in that removed sense. But Sherlock Holmes is simply there. I would be astonished if I went to 221 1/2 B Baker Street and didn't find

Rex Stout

The best plot twists are the ones you didn't expect.

Shannon L. Alder

The novels we read allow us to encounter possible persons, versions of ourselves hat we would never see, never permit ourselves to see, never permit ourselves to become, in places we can never go and might not care to, while assuring that we get to return home again

Thomas C. Foster

I seem finally to have stopped worrying about Elinor, and age. She seems now to be perfectly normal -- about twenty-five, a witty control freak. I like her but I can see how she would drive you mad. She's just the sort of person you'd want to get drunk, just to make her giggling and silly.

Emma Thompson

Some writers, notably Anton Chekov, argue that all characters must be admirable, because once we've looked at anyone deeply enough and understood their motivation we must identify with them rather than judge them.

Scarlett Thomas

I never draw blood on a first date.

Talla Demoniac Dance

Listen to what you have written. A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don't yet understand the characters well enough to write in their vo

Helen Dunmore

You’re the girl that I have been wanting. You’re the girl that I could see myself with forever. And most importantly, you’re the girl that I’ve fallen in love with.

M.S. Watson

The characters who go to make up my stories and novels are not portraits. Characters I invent along with the story that carries them. Attached to them are what I've borrowed, perhaps unconsciously, bit by bit, of persons I have seen or noticed or remembered in the flesh - a cast of countenance here, a manner of walking there, that jumps to the visualizing mind when a story is under way. I don't write by invasion into the life of a real person: my own sense of privacy is too strong for that; and I also know instinctively that living people to whom you are close - those known to you in ways too deep, too overflowing, ever to be plumbed outside love - do not yield to, could never fit into, the demands of a story. Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write most entirely out of yourself, that a character becomes in its own right another human being on the page.

Eudora Welty

There are two characters in me: a doodler and a tuner. And the only thing that makes me go crazy is when they both fight for their turn.

Shawn Lukas

We never end up with the book we began writing. Characters twist it and turn it until they get the life that is perfect for them. A good writer won't waste their time arguing with the characters they create...It is almost always a waste of time and people tend to stare when you do!

C.K. Webb

Forget the fictional characters – how many authors are being stopped on the street?

Joshua Cohen

That's a good point," Professor Hirota said. "But there is one thing we ought to keep in mind in the study of man. Namely, that a human being placed in particular circumstances has the ability and the right to do just the opposite of what the circumstances dictate. The trouble is, we have this odd habit of thinking that men and light both act according to mechanical laws, which leads to some stunning errors. We set things up to make a man angry, and he laughs. We try to make him laugh, and again he does the opposite, he gets angry. Either way, though, he's still a human being."Hirota had enlarged the scope of the problem again."Well, then, what you're saying is, no matter what a human being does in a particular set of circumstances, he is being natural," said the novelist at the far end of the table."That's it," Hirota shot back. "It seems to me that you might create any sort of character in a novel and there would be at least one person in the world just like him. We humans are simply incapable of imagining non-human actions or behavior. It's the writer's fault if we don't believe in his characters as human beings.

Sōseki Natsume

I will take what I can from Edward. And then I will let them fade into history, all the characters in this drama. Emma Matthews and the men who loved her, who became obsessed with her. They're not important to us now.

J.P. Delaney

Addicts don't like when you tell them they are all the same. Of course not. Who would? But to me, addicts are like actresses, who all audition for the same role in a horror movie. It doesn't matter how they got to the audition. It doesn't matter how or where they grew up, once they get to the audition, all the actresses act in the same way and read the same lines. They all become the same character.

Oliver Markus

Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.

John Banville

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

Just me, my music, and the voices in my head.

Christie Silvers

I miss the days when I was alone with my characters and no one else knew them except me.

Lian Hearn

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.

Claudia Bakker

When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away - even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that person knows himself or herself. You're sort of a predator, an invader of people.

William Trevor

It is my deepest desire to share the worlds of people we don’t often see or read about in media. With my writing I seek to introduce you to the worlds I’ve always known existed around me and within me.

Casey Curry

Delicious days ahead for solitude and writing and, oh yes, the holiday meal with family. Live with my characters until term starts in 2012!

Stella Atrium

The driver, a black silhouette upon his box, whipped up his bony horses. Icy silence in the coach. Marius, motionless, his body braced in the corner of the carriage, his head dropping down upon his breast, his arms hanging, his legs rigid, appeared to await nothing now but a coffin; Jean Valjean seemed made of shadow, and Javert of stone.

Victor Hugo

Outside Styx's apartment was not the first time Rochester and I had met, or would it be the last. We first encountered each other at Haworth House in Yorkshire when my mind was young and the barrier between reality and make-believe had not yet hardened into the shell that cocoons us in adult life. The barrier was soft, pliable and, for a moment, thanks to the kindness of a stranger and the power of a good storytelling voice, I made the short journey--and returned.

Jasper Fforde

I won't sacrifice my characters morals/intentions/motives for the sake of what I believe is right or wrong. If the action fits the character it will be written. That's that.

James DeSantis

I won't do this movie because I don't believe the love story," she told Selznick. "The heroine is an intellectual woman, and an intellectual woman simply can't fall in love so deeply.

Ingrid Bergman

Life is better than any movie or TV show. In real life there is no plot and there are billions of characters.

Marc Pamittan

Write what you love. Fill your pages with the beating of your own heart, the breath from your own lungs. Live through your characters. Let your characters live through you. Then you will love what you write, and others will, too.

Amanda Emerson

And who would dare write their own death into the script so that the rest of the characters in the tale might live? God of course.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.

Milan Kundera

I write flawed characters. Ones that do not always make the best decisions and are driven by ambition or lust. They are not black or white, they are in the large space that exists between.

Kevin James Breaux

Discover everything about your characters that you can before you write your story. If you get stuck at any point, they will write your dialog for you.

Michael J. Kannengieser

You can't write a sory until you've felt. Breathe it in. Walked with your characters. Talked with them. That's why you come here. To live your story.

Angelica Banks

And the only sign of life is the ticking of the pen, introducing characters to memory like old friends.

Fish

You can never know enough about your characters

W Somerset Maugham

A book is simply a snap shot of the full story.

Erica Goros

Anyone can be a story. Everyone is.

Johnny Rich

God is the source of life, honour and wealth.

Lailah Gifty Akita

I turned to the window. A single raindrop fell against it, and seeing my reflection in the glass, I suddenly knew why Finn’s eyes were familiar.They were exactly like mine.

Pamela Nicole

We are all characters in the book of life.

John E. Carson

The persons whom you cannot care for in a novel, because they are so bad, are the very same that you so dearly love in your life, because they are so good.

Anthony Trollope

One of the most dangerous of literary ventures is the little, shy, unimportant heroine whom none of the other characters value. The danger is that your readers may agree with the other characters.

C.S. Lewis

To keep any great nation up to a high standard of civilization there must be enough superior characters to hold the balance of power, but the very moment the balance of power gets into the hands of second-rate men and women, a decline of that nation is inevitable.

Christian D. Larson

Besides it's not as though the prisoner can truly die, any more than a character in a novel can. You can always flip back to the first page, can't you?

Django Wexler

When the river meets the sea, he dies! Because the character of the river is to flow and when the character dies, everything dies!

Mehmet Murat ildan

GreenHollyWood is a bad character, fat, liking jokes, liking jokes about size, about the large, about the how big are you. Likes to laugh when you make a mistake, ... but but he is a teacher?! With a glasses a fat guy!

Deyth Banger

Films, truths!Question 1How you get sad in movie?Mainly the music makes you sad if something happens and there isn't music... there isn't and sadness.Question 2How do you get in best level scared?- It's need silence... footsteps... silence... silence and then from nowhere something to came out.Question 3How do you make people to love the characters?- People like all kinds of characters, but to love them they should hear not what they want but what they won't expect, a character based on their problems and experience...

Deyth Banger

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.

Judith Kohnen

The only way you can talk about this great tide in which you’re a participant is as Schopenhauer did: the universe is a dream dreamed by a single dreamer where all the dream characters dream too.

Joseph Campbell

A novelist's characters must be with him as he lies down to sleep, and as he wakes from his dreams. He must learn to hate them and to love them.

Anthony Trollope

Stories start in all sorts of places. Where they begin often tells the reader of what to expect as they progress. Castles often lead to dragons, country estates to deeds of deepest love (or of hate), and ambiguously presented settings usually lead to equally as ambiguous characters and plot, leaving a reader with an ambiguous feeling of disappointment. That's one of the worst kinds.

Rebecca McKinsey

That's what novels are: They're amalgams of archetypes, collections of random traits one observes in other people through life, blended into fresh characters.

Michael Callahan

I intend to see that justice is done by presiding, in the manner of the omnipotent Walter Mitty, as chief justice of a tribunal trying the case of those plotting further advances for the Chinese characters on an international scale. Emulating the operatic Mikado's "object all sublime... to let the punishment fit the crime," I hand down the following dread decree:Anyone who believes Chinese characters to be a superior system of writing that can function as a universal script is condemned to complete the task of rendering the whole of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address into Singlish.

John DeFrancis

In daily life we never understand each other, neither complete clairvoyance nor complete confessional exists. We know each other approximately, by external signs, and these serve well enough as a basis for society and even for intimacy. But people in a novel can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist wishes; their inner as well as their outer life can be exposed. And this is why they often seem more definite than characters in history, or even our own friends; we have been told all about them that can be told; even if they are imperfect or unreal they do not contain any secrets, whereas our friends do and must, mutual secrecy being one of the conditions of life upon this globe.

E.M. Forster

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Characters Quotes

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