Characters Quotes

It is sometimes the minor, not the major, characters in a novel who hold the author's affection long...

T[he rules of writing] require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of c...

The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of th...

As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situ...

The magic and the danger of fiction is this: it allows us to see through other eyes. It takes us to ...

This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are imaginary, excepting o...

As a writer, I demand the right to write any character in the world that I want to write. I demand t...

A Dickens character to me is a theatrical projection of a character. Not that it isn't real. It's re...

Sow a thought, and you reap an act;Sow an act, and you reap a habit;Sow a habit, and you reap a char...

[W]hen I put Jorge in the library I did not yet know he was the murderer. He acted on his own, so to...

The driver, a black silhouette upon his box, whipped up his bony horses. Icy silence in the coach. M...

. . . clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude.

I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that liter...

You can never know enough about your characters

The flimsy little protestations that mark the front gate of every novel, the solemn statements that ...

It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can...

If you're silent for a long time, people just arrive in your mind.

You want to avoid at all costs drawing your characters on those that already exist in other works of...

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

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

In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from ...

One likes to think that there is some fantastic limbo for the children of imagination, some strange,...

One of the most dangerous of literary ventures is the little, shy, unimportant heroine whom none of ...

In a book, even the real bastards can't hurt you. And you can never loose a friend you make in a boo...

In daily life we never understand each other, neither complete clairvoyance nor complete confessiona...

I seem finally to have stopped worrying about Elinor, and age. She seems now to be perfectly normal ...

It was not my intention - it never was - to invent a character who should speak for me, the author, ...

The characters who go to make up my stories and novels are not portraits. Characters I invent along ...

I have lived so long within the circle of this book [Tender Is The Night] and with these characters ...

And thus it happens that the reader, the closer he comes to the novel's end, the more he wishes he w...

Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blending with the fiction, playi...

Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.

It’s very true; there are many more iron pots certainly than porcelain. But you may depend on it tha...

I won't do this movie because I don't believe the love story," she told Selznick. "The heroine is an...

Outside Styx's apartment was not the first time Rochester and I had met, or would it be the last. We...

The characters within a book were, from a certain point of view, identical on some fundamental level...

I care more about the people in books than the people I see every day.

I see God now as an unimaginative writer of popular fictions, someone who builds stories around sadi...

I see God now as an unimaginative writer of popular fictions, someone who builds stories around sadi...

Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise ...

I don't know where people got the idea that characters in books are supposed to be likable. Books ar...

Like, in general I think people have very complicated reasons for wanting things, and we often have ...

In general there should be gay characters in YA because a) surprise, there are gay folks everywhere ...

Many of the characters are fools and they're always playing tricks on meand treating me badly.

The only way you can talk about this great tide in which you’re a participant is as Schopenhauer did...

You take people, you put them on a journey, you give them peril, you find out who they really are.