Top 100 Character Writing Quotes
#1. I love Charlie, Billy Burke's character. Writing for him is so spectacular, he's so funny and wry and every scene he's in he just takes. There's a scene in 'Eclipse' where Bella tells him she's a virgin, and it's the funniest, most awkward scene I've ever seen on film.
Melissa Rosenberg
#2. I do play all the characters, when I write them, one after another. If they actually had to film me, the only one I could play would be Samwell Tarly or Hot Pie.
George R R Martin
#3. I guess that in a lot of ways, my writing is more of a character to me than something that I feel personally attached to.
Angel Olsen
#4. Sometimes I create a character from a scrap - a mere mention that has been left behind.
Sara Sheridan
#5. But [Patrick's] character is partly based on a boy named Mark who lived across the street from me when I was growing up ... I liked hanging out with him and was sad when he moved away after only a year in the neighborhood. I guess writing about Patrick is a way for me to spend more time with Mark.
Linda Sue Park
#6. I always plan the whole story in some detail, long before I start writing the actual thing. But even doing that, I find that there is plenty of room for spontaneity. Often the characters will lead the story off in a direction I hadn't originally intended!
Raymond Buckland
#7. I think that the joy of writing a novel is the self-exploratio n that emerges and also that wonderful feeling of playing God with the characters. When I sit down at my writing desk, time seems to vanish ... I think the most important thing for a writer is to be locked in a study.
Erica Jong
#8. For me, it's important that I experience and feel what the characters are feeling. So I put myself in those moments, in their thoughts, and let it happen naturally. I write what I feel.
Chevy Stevens
#9. When I start, I have a feeling for the characters, and maybe the shape of the story. Sometimes I might even have the last sentence in mind. But, no book I've ever written has ever ended the way I thought it would. Characters disappear, others come forward. Once you start writing, everything changes.
Paul Auster
#10. I think that fiction writers can write about anyone. If you are writing a character, and the only thing they are to you is their otherness, then you haven't written a character.
Hanya Yanagihara
#11. I write from this tight third-person viewpoint, where each chapter is seen through the eyes of one individual character. When I'm writing that character, I become that character and identify with that character.
George R R Martin
#12. I grew up writing thank-you notes. Real, honest-to-goodness, pen-and-ink, stamped and posted letters. More than simple habit, it's about what the commitment to expressing your thoughts and feelings in writing says about the character of the writer. About the joy such notes bring to the reader.
Taylor Mali
#13. I think the business of writing a great deal of it is the business of paying attention to your characters, to the world they live in, to the story you have to tell, but just a kind of deep attention and out of that if you pay attention properly the story will tell you what it needs.
Salman Rushdie
#14. I love the walking contradiction of the body. I want to make corporeal characters, corporeal writing, I want to bring the intensities and contradictions and beauty and violence and stench and desire and astonishing physicality of the body back into literature.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#15. You know, I've always wrote my best stuff when it takes me hardly any time at all. Actually I wrote ... this is actually a really funny story ... 'Ghost Of Vincent Price', I've been wanting to write a song about Vincent Price coz he's one of my favorite characters of all time.
Wednesday 13
#16. 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
#17. Short of a small range of physical acts-a fight, murder, lovemaking-dialogue is the most vigorous and visible inter-action of which characters in a novel are capable. Speech is what characters do to each other.
Elizabeth Bowen
#18. People should know better than to be an ass in front of writers. We immortalize things. Lots of things. And we take liberties with character descriptions.
Michelle M. Pillow
#19. The art of fiction is freedom of will for your characters.
Cynthia Ozick
#20. Dialogue has to show not only something about the speaker that is its own revelation, but also maybe something about the speaker that he doesn't know but the other character does know.
Eudora Welty
#21. I start with an image, then I go from the image toward exploring the situation. Then I write a scene, and from the scene I find the character, from the character I find the larger plot. It's like deductive reasoning - I start with the smaller stuff and work backward.
Dan Chaon
#22. Dialogue is the ideal means of showing what is between the characters. It crystallizes relationships. It should, ideally, be so effective as to make analysis or explanation of the relationships between the characters unnecessary.
Elizabeth Bowen
#23. One exercise I always do when I'm getting to know a character is ask her to tell me her secrets. Sit down with a pen and paper, and start with, 'I never told anybody ... ' and go from there, writing in the voice of your character.
Jennifer McMahon
#24. Once you start writing a character visually, you're in trouble.
Melissa McCarthy
#25. When you've got good writing, you can kind of give up all the research, in a way, and start just following the emotional integrity of the journey of your character.
Linus Roache
#26. Oftentimes, when people don't respond to text messages or emails, I just start writing long, long in-depth essays and diatribes where characters start to appear and narrative threads begin.
Lucas Neff
#27. I really like Shakespeare a lot. The characters that he writes for females, I think, are really great and a lot more compelling than what modern writers write, which is weird because they didn't have actresses then.
Julia Stiles
#28. On Writing About Nora Hawks
I write about a female character to try, in vain, to understand two things: the purpose of life, and women.
Dennis R. Miller
#29. Basically you come up with the fictional idea and you start writing that story, but then in order to write it and to make it seem real, you sometimes put your own memories in. Even if it's a character that's very different from you.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#30. The biggest misconception is that I only write about shitty people. Or that I'm trying to be shocking. I just think people are super weird, so I like to write characters that get addicted to things, lose their minds, hurt others, put themselves in bad situations. I'm just more interested in that.
Leslye Headland
#31. If the character is really well-rounded, and it's a really strong character, and if the writing is just fantastic, that's the thing that will hook me in, certainly.
Amanda Abbington
#32. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
Kurt Vonnegut
#33. Choice betrays character," I said.
"That's not true." Loring moved his finger along the
sheet as if writing his name in cursive. "Eliza, you can't judge a man solely on his actions. Sometimes actions are nothing more than reactions.
Tiffanie DeBartolo
#34. The person you are (in total, at that moment in time) is what creates the story you're writing. It's infused in every piece of punctuation, in the plot, in the most minor character who crosses the page. It's all your voice.
Victor LaValle
#35. I think it's really hard to make songs that pursue an agenda. You can kind of do it a little bit through a character, so the character gives voice to something or their story, the story of the character tells you something, but, for me anyway, it's really hard to write directly about politics.
David Byrne
#36. There's just a deeper level of sophistication in the writing of female characters on TV.
Vera Farmiga
#37. The most fun part for an actor is the writing and the story and the character. That's very fulfilling.
Dominique McElligott
#38. Writing a novel, in an unplanned and unpredictable way, makes you engaged; it takes you into yourself, and it becomes something between you and the character for a moment, and then you move back into the structure of the book. I love those moments, because they are completely unbidden.
David Bezmozgis
#39. Realize that by hurting your own characters, you are not a sadist. You are not deliberately hurting your loved ones merely to watch them suffer. You're giving a gift. You're helping them grow and develop. Your characters take on deeper meaning to become more alive on your pages. They'll become real.
James Chartrand
#40. Yeah, and the language the "we" has, and the character the "we" has. Because that was the part of the book that I didn't plan out, but the part that I was most curious about as I was writing. You know what you're doing, but you're sometimes still sort of curious as you're writing it.
Chang-rae Lee
#41. Good storytelling lets the audience relive events in the present so they can understand the forces, choices, and emotions that led the character to do what he did.
John Truby
#42. Authors have to write for their characters, for who they are, that's the strength of books. Don't worry about censors. Just write the story you need to tell and the rewards will come.
Ellen Hopkins
#43. For me, if the writing and - by extension - the subject matter and the characters are all good, it doesn't matter if it's film or TV. Each medium has great things going for it.
Adam Croasdell
#44. Nietzsche himself was a great moralist; his writings abound with value judgments about individuals, character types, modes of thinking, and national traits. It is as if he develops immoralist psychology in order to tame his own nature, to keep his own greatest vice in check.
John Carroll
#45. I really was a fan of his and always have been - his writing especially, you know? I think people a lot of times overlook that part, because he kind of got into that party character so heavy.
Alan Jackson
#46. Allowing alternative narrative modes in popular entertainment may seem obvious, yet when you turn a pilot into the people upstairs and the main character isn't after what she wants by the top of page two, you get treated as if you've failed at writing.
Andrea Seigel
#47. We all have these tendencies in us that could go this way or that. I think that's the real key in writing. To look at a character without judgment.
Paul Haggis
#48. The telling of any character is what they do in a different situation.
Sara Sheridan
#49. When men write women, they tend to write women the way they want women to be, or the way they resent women for being. They don't really - they seldom nail it. It takes a woman to write a really good female character. I like that.
Simon Pegg
#50. Being passionate about something is the most beautiful characteristic you can develop.
Charlotte Eriksson
#51. What I enjoy most are those times when I get an idea and it just flows - the words coming so fast that I'm scribbling to keep up with my characters. I don't have any writing must-haves; this is a good thing, since I've done a lot of my writing in random places like the playground or the subway.
Leah Cypess
#52. The great thing about writing is that you always put yourself in the shoes of the character. If you're doing it right, you can see into the heart of all your characters. Usually, when there's a writing problem, it's because you aren't doing that.
Peter Gould
#53. Pace, like everything else in writing, involves a trade-off. If you're not offering the reader a lot of action to keep her interested, you must offer something else in its stead. Slow pace is ideal for complex character development, detailed description, and nuances of style.
Nancy Kress
#54. I was always fascinated by the fact that you could take paper and ink and create worlds, images, characters. It seemed like magic.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#55. I'd say that any character or setting can be given a bit of an otherworldly sheen and be the better for it. The one thing I insist on with my own writing is that I won't let magic solve my characters' real world problems. The solutions have to come from the characters themselves.
Charles De Lint
#56. Life is a book that someone else is reading - and you, a key character - hence the need for continual conflict and resolution. We can't have any boring books.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#57. In nearly everything I write, I am like a ventriloquist, throwing my voice into my characters, animating them by the slightest twitch as I register my anxieties and alarms. This is true even in my comedies.
Norman Lock
#58. I don't think there is a single sentence in this whole book [East of Eden] that does not either develop character, carry on the story or provide necessary background.
John Steinbeck
#59. A risk for a poet-novelist is imbalance: The poems can flatten into prose or lose their intensity of focus; the novels can stall amid lofty writing or literary preciousness and ignore the engine of plot and character.
Floyd Skloot
#60. As you write your novel, you gradually start thinking like some of your characters in it. And at times the writer may lose himself completely in some character.
Avijeet Das
#61. I write poems about relationships, love relationships, and I'm not able to do that all the time. I could go two years without writing poems, and then write a dozen. Having a novel to work on, with the intricate puzzle of character and plot to work out, is satisfying for the time there is no poetry.
May Sarton
#62. For character, to prepare for the inevitable I recommend selections from [Ralph Waldo] Emerson. His writings have done for me far more than all other reading.
Rutherford B. Hayes
#63. Even as I was writing 'Empire State,' I knew there were more adventures for the main character, private detective Rad Bradley, to have. I also knew that the world was far larger than what I'd presented in book one.
Adam Christopher
#64. Writing 'Deadpool' can be a lot of fun. When I first started working with the character, I wasn't sure I'd like him. I quickly realized, though, that a writer can do pretty much anything with him - comedic stories, serious stories, completely nonsensical stories.
Cullen Bunn
#65. For 350 years we have been taught that reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man and writing an exact man. Football's place is to add a patina of character, a deference to the rules and a respect for authority.
Red Smith
#67. Sometimes minor characters are based on people I know, on friends of mine. But I'm not writing a thinly veiled version of my own life.
Cassandra Clare
#68. Writing is really freeing because it's the only part of the process where it's just you and the characters and you are by yourself in a room and you can just hash it out. There are no limitations.
Dee Rees
#69. I find it an easy way into writing pieces is to think what the character's voice is like, and start from there.
Armando Iannucci
#70. Every good story needs a good, bad and lost soul. A people to fight for, an item to turn the tide of battle, an enigmatic character, a motivator/mentor, and an unlikely reluctant hero.
Josh Rose
#71. Writing a main character is very important to me. Because each time I create one, it feels like another piece of me in a different world.
B.A. Gabrielle
#72. Writing is a solitary existence. Making a movie is controlled chaos - thousands of moving parts and people. Every decision is a compromise. If you're writing and you don't like how your character looks or talks, you just fix it. But in a movie, if there's something you don't like, that's tough.
Dan Brown
#73. I don't really have a drive toward being a director at all. Not that I wouldn't rule it out, but I just don't think my instincts lie necessarily in a very visual way. But I am very interested in storytelling, narrative and character development, so writing is something that I absolutely want to do.
Rose McIver
#74. When I was writing my first draft, and feeling grandiose, I e-mailed an artist/clothing designer I know and suggested we collaborate on a fashion line inspired by the outfits my characters wore. I regret that we never did that.
Heidi Julavits
#75. Things that only a writer would understand - you're writing a character - you tell that character who she or he is and they stop you and make it clear, they are the ones telling their story. You just have to let them tell it.
Lisa Marbly-Warir
#76. The strongest should come first in comedy because once a character is really established as funny everything he does is funny.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#77. My own feeling is that the only possible reason for engaging in the hard labor of writing a novel, is that one is bothered by something one needs to understand, and can come to understand only through the characters in the imagined situation.
May Sarton
#78. When I'm writing I don't want anyone else in the room - including myself.
Jonathan Franzen
#79. If you want to do your version, go off and write it. You bring your knowledge to it, and you can use that to shape it and color it, but it's someone else's version of that character. You're not actually playing the real person.
Jared Harris
#80. A writer's knowledge of himself, realistic and unromantic, is like a store of energy on which he must draw for a lifetime: one volt of it properly directed will bring a character to life.
Graham Greene
#82. When a place comes across vividly in a novel, it's often compared to a character. I can remember writing teachers who encouraged me to treat setting as if it were a character, to give it three dimensions, to make it come alive, jump off the page.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#83. I never actually do rehearsals. That's one of the reasons that I write those bios and if I can meet with the actors I'll meet them or talk to them on the phone. What I want is for them to come on set knowing their lines and knowing who the character is.
John Sayles
#84. Whether I'm writing the script, or someone else writes the initial draft, I'm always an actor's director first. I always try to listen to them a lot and try to put their voices into their character.
Dito Montiel
#85. I write characters that are based on elements of people I know and experiences I've really had.
Aziz Ansari
#86. I don't see one as bring better or more literate than the other and there's a real buzz to not only writing about a character I love like Superman, but also writing something that kids can enjoy.
Mark Millar
#87. I regard writing not as an investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed.
Evelyn Waugh
#88. ... I go through a story for lies. I might discover the lie of trying to show off. Sometimes they're lies of character. Sometimes they are lies of writing the most beautiful sentence in the world that has nothing to do with the story.
Grace Paley
#89. When you write a novel you have to live with the characters for a long time. So I prefer short stories. I never wrote anything more than 250 pages.
Ruskin Bond
#90. When I write fiction, I create characters whose views are not my own, and I allow them to be eloquent in defense of their, not my, views.
Orson Scott Card
#91. So research is a terribly imperfect science, and you learn an awful lot more after you've published a book, because people keep writing to you and saying, 'Oh, gosh, I was related to such and such a character and I have a letter in my possession.'
Simon Winchester
#92. Characters aren't a fling. They aren't a one-night stand. Getting to know them takes time and hard work. It takes excessive free writes and multiple experiments.
Margaret Foley
#93. My characters will happily march off a cliff if it is in them to do so, but may the gods help me if I write that the character is an alcoholic when they are not. They will fight me at every turn and it is their domain. A writer cannot win against a stubborn character.
Thomm Quackenbush
#94. With the story of your life, you dont get to write the whole book, just your character.
Olivia Munn
#95. The greatest compliment a writer can be given is that a story and character hold a reader spellbound. I'm caught up in the story writing and I miss a good deal of sleep thinking about it and working out the plot points.
Iris Johansen
#96. I don't write the same book over and over - I think if I did that, I would stop writing. I couldn't write a series with the same character, and I couldn't write a romance novel over and over again that takes place at a different beach every year. That's not who I am.
Jodi Picoult
#97. If you're writing a scene for a character with whom you disagree in every way, you still need to show how that character is absolutely justified in his or her own mind, or the scene will come across as being about the author's views rather than about the character's.
Tana French
#98. What I do in the writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself. It is the act of a writer's imagination that I set the most high.
Eudora Welty
#99. There's a point I can get to where I start writing character and then through the dialogue, after all of this preparation, the thing starts to feel like it's a character developing through the dialogue. A lot of character traits do come from writing dialogue, but I have to be ready to do it.
Charlie Kaufman
#100. I write what I can. I think being able to write like Michael Connelly and have a character that goes from novel to novel, or to dramatize history like Vidal or Ellroy, or have an explosively inventive mind like Bulgakov, would be an incredible thing. I don't have that. I only have what I have.
Henry Rollins
