Characters In A Novel Quotes

#1. Many of us would not make terribly interesting characters in a novel.

Claire Wingfield

#2. 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

#3. Characters in a novel or a play who act all the way through exactly as one expects them to ... This consistency of theirs, which is held up to our admiration, is on the contrary the very thing which makes us recognise that they are artificially composed.

Andre Gide

#4. Our life is a book that writes itself and whose principal themes sometimes escape us. We are like characters in a novel who do not always understand what the author wants of them.

Julien Green

#5. It is sometimes the minor, not the major, characters in a novel who hold the author's affection longest. It may be that one loses affection for the major characters because they suck off so much energy as one pushes them through their lives.

Larry McMurtry

#6. I write a ridiculous number of drafts. The characters change and grow through the drafting, and my understanding of them deepens. Creating characters in a novel is like shooting at clay pigeons and missing, and then missing more productively as the narrative continues.

Robert Boswell

#7. There is a technical, literary term for those who mistake the opinions and beliefs of characters in a novel for those of the author. The term is 'idiot'.

Larry Niven

#8. Like a clock of life on which the seconds race, the page number hangs over the characters in a novel. Where is the reader who has not once lifted to it a fleeting, fearful glance?

Walter Benjamin

#9. What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That's what their substance is.

Jonathan Miller

#10. The most important thing in business is a persona, Nico,' he was fond of saying. 'People want to know immediately what they're dealing with. And when they think about you, you've got to stand out in their minds
like one of those characters in a novel.

Candace Bushnell

#11. We are all potentially characters in a novel
with the difference that characters in a novel really get to live their lives to the full.

Georges Simenon

#12. A lasting marriage, they say, is one where the two reach for different sections of the Sunday paper. Me, I go right for the obituaries, just like those very elderly characters in Muriel Spark's spooky novel, 'Memento Mori.'

Billy Collins

#13. When I tell people there are three stories in 'Thunderstruck' that were from the same wrecked novel, they want to guess what they are. Nobody has. There are no characters or timelines in common. They're structured very differently. A good novel wouldn't have pulled apart so easily.

Elizabeth McCracken

#14. I have a lot of blurring between fiction and non-fiction in so many of my works. For example, my first novel, 'When Nietzsche Wept,' has a great deal of non-fiction in it. I didn't create many characters at all. Almost all of them are historical characters that actually existed.

Irvin D. Yalom

#15. What I like to write about is stuff I know. I don't think I could write a novel. I don't think I have it in me to come up with those kinds of characters.

Carol Burnett

#16. Romance novels have the power to bring love into the lives of readers. Through the characters, we get to fall in love every time we pick up a romance novel. What could be better than that?

Lori Wilde

#17. No one has a name in 'The Road.' Like Cormac McCarthy's novel from which it's adapted, 'The Road' features characters such as the man, the boy, the wife, the old man and the veteran.

Garret Dillahunt

#18. I write easily, let's put it that way. And in a novel particularly, the characters take over. And they tell me what to say and they tell me what they're doing. And I'm a third of the way into a novel and then I just let the characters finish it for me.

Andrew Greeley

#19. An important feature of good characterization in a novel is that the characters are dimensionalized and are not all of one piece. Human beings, as Singer noted, have contradictions.

Joseph Telushkin

#20. In a novel, on the other hand, you not only have to describe the rooms, but the clothes, the characters and what they are thinking. It's a much more in-depth process.

Sidney Sheldon

#21. I keep telling you, you don't pay enough attention to the minor characters. A novel should be like a street full of strangers, where no more than two or three people are known to us in depth.

Irene Nemirovsky

#22. Once a novel gets going and I know it is viable, I don't then worry about plot or themes. These things will come in almost automatically because the characters are now pulling the story.

Chinua Achebe

#23. There is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character or characters.

Anthony Burgess

#24. I was thinking about what I wanted to write next, after my first novel, and had decided that I wanted to write a story with a lot of strong female characters in it.

Joan D. Vinge

#25. What do you do in a novel? You take recognizable characters from your own life, and you fantasize about what they're really like.

Joe Klein

#26. A writer should bury his thoughts deep and convey them through the characters in his novel.

Mo Yan

#27. I live intimately with my characters before starting a book. I cut out pictures of them for my wall. I do time lines for each major character and a time line for the entire novel: What is going on in the world as my characters struggle with their problems?

Walter Dean Myers

#28. You can be interested in a Jane Smiley novel whether or not anyone says a word. She enters into her characters' thoughts with great understanding and depth.

Richard Russo

#29. What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

Nicole Krauss

#30. I don't think I ever intended specifically to write for the young adult market. It's just that when the idea for City of Bones came to me, I knew the main characters were teenagers. In my mind they were just very clearly the ages they were, which turned out to mean it was a YA novel.

Cassandra Clare

#31. I've always been a fan of the 19th century novel, of the novel that is plotted, character-driven, and where the passage of time is almost as central to the novel as a major minor character, the passage of time and its effect on the characters in the story.

John Irving

#32. I strongly believe that the art of the novel works best when the writer identifies with whoever he or she is writing about. Novels in the end are based on the human capacity, compassion, and I can show more compassion to my characters if I write in a first person singular.

Orhan Pamuk

#33. Different narrative forms naturally lend themselves to different aspects of existence. The novel is ideal for presenting the inner lives of its characters, the play is ideal for showing people in a room talking and movies are ideal for showing large metal objects hurtling through the air.

Todd Alcott

#34. In many ways, it's easier to write a book. You have more latitude with structure, and you have the freedom to luxuriate within the internal lives and musings of your characters. But where a screenplay does not always demand great prose, a novel lives or dies by it.

John Fusco

#35. For a writer to put his own intellectual musings, which he might sell for a low price as essays, into the mouths of artificially constructed characters which are more remunerative when issued as people in a novel is good economics, perhaps, but does not make literature.

Ernest Hemingway,

#36. She had a way about her that spoke of homemade bread, and caring for people, and the kind of patience that women have when they help a ewe birth a lamb, or stay up in the night with a baby calf bawling for its momma.

James Aura

#37. My favorite novel is 'To Kill a Mockingbird' because of its broad sweep, its tackling of big issues in ways that even young minds can make sense of and for the heart of the characters, who span a wide range of ages. I reread it every year.

Ridley Pearson

#38. When I imagine changing places with her I get the feeling I do on finishing a novel with a brick-wall happy ending
I mean the kind of ending when you never think any more about the characters.

Dodie Smith I Capture The Castle

#39. It reminded him of a science fiction novel that he'd read once; in it, the characters had a tendency to say ominously that 'winter was coming' and Sin had to fight the urge to say the words out loud with the exact same ominous feeling behind.

Ais

#40. Writing a novel is a huge adventure; when it's going well it's more fun than fun. When it stutters to a halt put it aside. Go for a swim, go for a walk, take a week off. Don't panic or be afraid; you and your characters are in it together. Trust them to come to your rescue.

Deborah Moggach

#41. The remaining, less developed characters, were still either listening or laughing. They were divided between curiosity and satisfaction. They felt happy, but did not know it.

Elias Canetti

#42. Few people in one's life ever go quite away. They turn up again like characters in a Simon Raven novel. It is as if Fate is a movie producer who cannot afford to keep introducing new characters into the script but must get as many scenes out of every actor as possible.

Stephen Fry

#43. I think that it's important to try to keep reality. I think that Gabriel Garcia Marquez speaks a lot about reality in his magical realism. So I don't think we have to be hyper-realistic. But we have to understand the pressures that undergird the lives of the characters within that novel.

Walter Mosley

#44. is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. THE

Brandon Sanderson

#45. Surely the test of a novel's characters is that you feel a strong interest in them and their affairs the good to be successful, the bad to suffer failure. Well, in John Ward, you feel no divided interest, no discriminating interest you want them all to land in hell together, and right away.

Mark Twain

#46. I believe a novel must first of all be a good story. My hope is that the spiritual message is woven in so well, is such a part of the fabric of the story and of the characters' lives, that it is subtle but meaningful. This is difficult to do well and is something I constantly endeavor to improve.

Julie Klassen

#47. Characters to me are like sonnets, they have limits that you obey which allow a force to enter in, an invention that makes the novel possible. Change the limits and the force leaves. The novel becomes impossible.

Alexander Chee

#48. After writing a novel, what is there to say? If a novelist could say it in a maxim, they wouldn't need 120,000 words, several years and sundry characters, plots and subplots, and so on. I'd much rather listen always.

Richard Flanagan

#49. His fierce appreciation of female beauty, the unrelenting desire he felt for their company, the pleasure he both derived and sought to give, had led him in and out of quite a few bedroom doors.

Roy L. Pickering Jr.

#50. I had thought for years, probably 30 or 40 years, that it would be a lot of fun to try my hand at a classic English mystery novel ... I love that form very much because the reader is so familiar with all of the types of characters that are in there that they already identify with the book.

Alan Bradley

#51. 'The Sound of Things Falling' may be a page turner, but it's also a deep meditation on fate and death. Even in translation, the superb quality of Vasquez's prose is evident, captured in Anne McLean's idiomatic English version. All the novel's characters are well imagined, original and rounded.

Edmund White

#52. I had been a reporter for 15 years when I set out to write my first novel. I knew how to research an article or profile a subject - skills that I assumed would be useless when it came to fiction. It was from my imagination that the characters in my story would emerge.

Amy Waldman

#53. This is a work of fiction.
If certain characters resemble people in real life, it is because certain people in real life resemble characters from a novel.
Nobody, therefore, is entitled to feel included in this book.
Nobody, by the same token, to feel excluded.

Fernando Del Paso

#54. 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

#55. By the way, the best place to find names for fictional characters, if you are ever foolish enough to write a novel, is in a Bradshaw or an ABC. All the nicest people always sound like railway stations.

Beverley Nichols

#56. 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

#57. In a novel there's not much autobiography. There are characters in transit. Naturally, I can project something of my experiences onto the characters, but they have their own autonomy, a personality that is often a mystery to me.

Dacia Maraini

#58. If there is a connection between Harry Potter and my new novel, it's my interest in characters.

J.K. Rowling

#59. Every day, I learn something new. I think one of the most exciting things for a writer is to work on a TV show. It's like a novel. You have a really long time to develop and learn about the characters, and you can just really keep digging in deeper, every week.

Elizabeth Meriwether

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. As a kid, my brother and I would read the same novel, we'd memorize entire pages, reenact the book as it's characters, and would immerse in playing like that for hours. I suppose it was a natural follow up, wanting to still play in a similar fashion, but as an adult.

Irena A. Hoffman

#63. When I'm writing a novel, I'm dealing with a double life. I live in the present at the same time that I live in the past with my characters. It is this that makes a novelist so eccentric and unpleasant.

John Phillips Marquand

#64. The script for what would eventually become my first graphic novel, 'Cairo,' sort of came to me in kind of a bolt of lightning within 24 hours of having moved to that city. Just a jumble of characters and narratives and interesting things that I was seeing and experiencing for the first time.

G. Willow Wilson

#65. When you read a fantasy novel part of the fun is getting to explore a new world. Everyone knows that. But I believe the same is true about characters. You can explore interesting people in the same way that you explore a town or a culture.

Patrick Rothfuss

#66. Whenever you have two characters in a book, whether it's a novel or nonfiction, you run the risk that the reader is going to like one more than the other. They're going to read one chapter and say, 'I can't wait to get back to the other guy.'

Mitch Albom

#67. In a science fiction novel, the world is a character, and often the most important character.
In a mainstream novel, the world is implicitly our world, and the characters are the world.

Jo Walton

#68. Fantasy novels reveal "emergency escape routes" from reality. Romance novels dish out a banquet of Eye Candy. Otherworldly passion erupts when the two collide in an epic novel of unforgettable characters and dire circumstances.

Sarah J. Pepper

#69. A great novel is concerned primarily with the interior lives of its characters as they respond to the inconvenient narratives that fate imposes on them. Movie adaptations of these monumental fictions often fail because they become mere exercises in interior decoration.

Richard Schickel

#70. Remember that a good football novel has to have the same ingredients as any other good novel: drama, convincing and interesting characters, a strong story-line, and some kind of magic in the writing.

Mal Peet

#71. I don't keep anything on paper (except within an actual novel in progress, at which point I need a file to keep track of plot threads, characters, and so on).

Charles Stross

#72. I always, always wanted to be the Dungeon Master because that's where the creativity lies - in thinking up places, characters and situations. If done well, a game can be a novel in itself.

Sharyn McCrumb

#73. There is always something of the writer in the work but I don't think Melville had to be swallowed by a whale to write a great novel. If I had lived the lives of all the characters of the songs I've written, that would truly be an extraordinary story.

Michael Stipe

#74. Life in a small town is like an intricately plotted novel, and even though I had read every book in the public library by the time I was fourteen, I found the real people around me saying and doing far more interesting things than did the imaginary book characters.

Maxine Cheshire

#75. I first read 'The Lord of the Rings' as an adolescent. It's a dense novel, a sprawling, complex monster of a book populated with a prolific number of characters caught up in a narrative structure that, frankly, does not lend itself to conventional storytelling.

Peter Jackson

#76. Reading a novel in which all characters illustrate patience, hard work, chastity, and delayed gratification could be a pretty dull experience.

Thomas Perry