Top 100 Fiction Characters Quotes
#1. In fiction, characters could punch their bosses and get away with it.
In real life, you lost your job, and then you were dining on Cup-a-Soup seven nights a week instead of four.
Sarah Morgan
#2. I think good radio often uses the techniques of fiction: characters, scenes, a big urgent emotional question. And as in the best fiction, tone counts for a lot.
Ira Glass
#3. I feel like these characters, these places, these beings and plots, and even these inanimate objects are counting on me for survival. It's my responsibility to reveal them to the world, to show my readers the names of these things, to show them their histories and stories.
Nicholas Trandahl
#4. Science fiction writers put characters into a world with arbitrary rules and work out what happens.
Rudy Rucker
#5. Trout might have said, and it can be said of me as well, that he created caricatures rather than characters. His animus against so-called mainstream literature, moreover, wasn't peculiar to him. It was generic among writers of science fiction.
Kurt Vonnegut
#6. You are the Worst Kind of Animal. A Butcher by Day and a Pussy Cat by Night.
Monroe Ariel
#7. I couldn't shake this feeling that I had uncovered more than something ordinary.
Nicole Gulla
#8. In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak. But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#9. I will go to my grave in a state of abject endless fascination that we all have the capacity to become emotionally involved with a personality that doesn't exist.
Berkeley Breathed
#10. If you ever meet someone who thinks they are so special, the best thing to do is smile. You don't have to say anything. Be friendly and then go do
your best. That will make you special, too!
Jeff Hutchins
#11. Dialogue in fiction is what characters do to one another.
Elizabeth Bowen
#12. The art of fiction is freedom of will for your characters.
Cynthia Ozick
#13. No one wants to rattle the cage of a "crazy" person whose family tends to snap.
Nicole Gulla
#14. Good characters in fiction are the very devil. Not only because most authors have too little material to make them of, but because we as readers have a strong subconscious wish to find them incredible.
C.S. Lewis
#15. Fantasy stories will always be popular, as there are always readers who are willing to escape, freely, to the worlds that the authors create, and spend time with the characters we give life to.
Jason Ellis
#16. There are very few works of fiction that take you inside the heads of all characters. I tell my writing students that one of the most important questions to ask yourself when you begin writing a story is this: Whose story is it? You need to make a commitment to one or perhaps a few characters.
Julia Glass
#17. What I hate in fiction is when the author knows better than the characters what they should do.
Pat Barker
#18. Is it the freedom of characters in fiction that we find so inspiring, or the way that freedom transforms them?
Marc Levy
#19. Since 1977, there have been many science fiction movies, but none has managed to equal [ A New Hope 's] blend of adventure, likable characters, and epic storytelling.
James Berardinelli
#20. I base the roles I choose depending on the characters. That's just how I'm gonna run my career. So if it's a good role I'm gonna take it whether it be fantasy, or whether it be realistic or fiction, anything.
Josh Hutcherson
#22. 'The Things They Carried' is labeled right inside the book as a work of fiction, but I did set out when I wrote the book to make it feel real ... I use my own name, and I dedicated the book to characters in the book to give it the form of a war memoir.
Tim O'Brien
#23. Fortunately, there is more to life than death. There is for one thing, fiction. A thousand thousand characters to be sent marching out into the world to divert time from its forward gallop to the terrible horizon.
Fay Weldon
#24. Secret Saturdays ought to be required reading at middle schools everywhere. Maldonado gives us both voice and heart. His young characters navigate a challenging world with endearing earnestness, lively style, and a heartening desire for true friendship and dignity.
E.R. Frank
#25. Sharon Shinn is a lover of words and a builder of worlds. She makes science-fiction seem like fantasy. Her characters jump off the page, finding their way under your skin and into your heart.
Alethea Kontis
#26. Good fantasy fiction: ... explores real human conditions through fantastic metaphors which universalize the characters' individual experiences to speak personally to us all.
Laura Resnick
#27. I enjoy receiving and giving realistic fiction, for both children and adults, with strong characters, beautiful language, and humane visions.
Sharon Creech
#28. 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 voices.
[Ten rules for writing fiction (The Guardian, 20 February 2010)]
Helen Dunmore
#29. The standards for horror fiction should be no less than those for 'serious literary' fiction in which originality of concept, depth of characters, and attentiveness to language are vitally important.
Joyce Carol Oates
#30. When our characters show us the full fire of that inner battle, we have the makings of great fiction. For whether the choice is ultimately for honor or dishonor, we will see the consequences and the reader will be instructed without being taught.
James Scott Bell
#31. I write fiction not for my readers and not for myself. I write fiction for the sake of those odd heroic characters that are contained therein. They are counting on me as much as I am counting on them.
Nicholas Trandahl
#32. Number one rule for fiction: Coincidence can be used to worsen a characters predicament, but never to solve his problems.
Vivian Vande Velde
#33. The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about the characters are going through and to experience the moral paradoxes and struggles of being human.
Tim O'Brien
#34. Fiction that fails to engage an audience with the emotional intricacies of viable characters will, for many in that audience, simply alienate them with its profound irrelevance at the human level.
Hal Duncan
#35. I have no problem in moving a date one way or another or coming up with a subplot that gets my characters in (or out) of a fix more rambunctiously than the extant records show.
Sara Sheridan
#36. If you read a book that's fiction and you get caught in the characters and the plot, and swept away, really, by the fiction of it - by the non-reality - you sometimes wind up changing your reality as well. Often, when the last page is turned, it will haunt you.
Jodi Picoult
#37. None but the most blindly credulous will imaging the characters and events in this story to be anything but fictitious. It is true that the ancient and noble city of Oxford is, of all the towns of England, the likeliest progenitor of unlikely events and persons. But there are limits.
Edmund Crispin
#38. The great mystery is why robots come off so well in science-fiction films when the human characters are often so astoundingly wooden.
John Podhoretz
#39. 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
#40. The reader can't take much for granted in a fiction where the scenery can eat the characters.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#41. You take people, you put them on a journey, you give them peril, you find out who they really are.
Joss Whedon
#43. I think the type of actor I am, I tend to play strong leading female characters. The shows I've been on happen to be science fiction genre.
Alaina Huffman
#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. 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
#46. Most people surrendered fairy tale hopes in exchange for cookie cutter lives
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#47. I find that in the science fiction world, you have almost more women fans than male fans and I think it's because there's been such a shortage of strong female characters.
Katee Sackhoff
#48. The characters and plot in this book are pure fiction. Any similarity to real persons living or dead, elected, convicted, or merely toppled from power, is entirely coincidental.
Thomas Gately Briody
#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. Writing is a solitary business. It's just you and your characters and a blank page you need to fill.
Shannon Celebi
#51. I do not allow fan-fiction. The characters are copyrighted. It upsets me terribly to even think about fan-fiction with my characters. I advise my readers to write your own original stories with your own characters. It is absolutely essential that you respect my wishes.
Anne Rice
#52. You're a lady. It's written all over you, but the West doesn't forgive any woman-unless she's got a man.
Liliana Shelbrook
#53. Characters more or less present themselves to me. I don't know their origins. I think if I did, if I seemed to myself to fabricate them, I could not induce suspension of disbelief in myself in the way writing fiction requires.
Marilynne Robinson
#54. Any author of fiction will tell you that characters don't need to be told what to do.
Alexander McCall Smith
#55. I believe black characters in fiction are still revolutionary, given our long history of erasure.
Tananarive Due
#56. Fiction may amuse us, but reality instills lessons to be imbibed through experience; to 'live' this stark reality called 'life' as a blessing, whereas some foolishly waste it by following fiction and fictitious characters.
Henrietta Newton Martin
#57. Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else ... Fiction depends for its life on place. Place is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of, What happened? Who's here? Who's coming? ...
Eudora Welty
#58. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Shannon Hale
#59. I shook my head back and forth as though I was a human etch-a-sketch, erasing the memory.
Nicole Gulla
#60. 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
#61. We liked to believe there is an alternate world, a better world, populated entirely by characters created by the yearnings of humanity
governing and inspiring themselves with all the lucidity wit which we rendered them.
Miguel Syjuco
#62. And although he recognized that tenderness was not the same as passion, and certainly not equivalent to love, for now it seemed to him a suitable substitute.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#63. Good fiction often gives us characters in extremity, which ironically gives us a clearer mirror in which to see ourselves.
Sarah Van Arsdale
#64. From its beginning, fan fiction has been written mostly by women. Originally, this was because of a dearth of interesting female characters in conventional sci-fi.
Russell Smith
#65. Unable to explore setting, conflict, characters or themes in their fiction, the mainstreamers wrote more and more eloquently about nothing at all.
Dave Wolverton
#66. The principle that characters do not want to change applies to more than just fiction.
Donald Miller
#67. Writing historical novels can be dangerous. We need to be as accurate and as fair about the historical record as we can be, at the same time as creating our fictional characters and, hopefully, telling a good story. The challenge is weaving the fiction into the history.
Edward Rutherfurd
#68. I think you can do science fiction, but you have to ground it in some realism. People need to identify with the characters, with their plights and their issues.
Faran Tahir
#69. Fiction writers learn about the development of metaphor, the use of rhythm, the way that language is compacted in order to express the feelings of - express their own feelings and the feelings of their characters.
Edward Hirsch
#70. I was so enthused with literature -- not stuck on literature, but in love with letters -- that I was easily inclined to bring all the conversations round to works I had read or fictitious characters from my readings about whom I loved to talk
Joseph Zobel
#71. If I've got one thing that I really believe about fiction and life, it's that there are no minor characters.
Jane Gardam
#72. I write fiction that reflects Islamic logic: fictional worlds where cause and effect are governed by Muslim rationale. However, my characters do not necessarily behave as 'good' Muslims; they are not ideals or role models.
Leila Aboulela
#73. The best fiction is geared towards conflict. We learn most about our characters through tension, when they are put up against insurmountable obstacles. This is true in real life.
Sufjan Stevens
#74. I'm always looking for complicated characters in fiction about whom I can feel a dozen feelings at once - in the space of a single paragraph, even.
Edan Lepucki
#75. The lovely thing about writing is, well, two things. One, writing fiction allows us to bring an order to our lives that doesn't exist in real life. And two, it allows us to create human characters that we know better than we will ever know anyone in real life.
Octavia E. Butler
#76. This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are imaginary, excepting only certain of the fairy folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof.
Neil Gaiman
#77. I thought about writing the character as male, but then I would be forced to portray him as a woman in a man's body.
Christopher Stocking
#78. Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea. If you think about fiction writing as a spectrum, where at one end of the spectrum in the infrared, are the story tellers, and the people for whom creation of wonderful characters and telling a good story is the most important thing.
Alan Lightman
#79. I've read crime fiction all my life. A thing that's bothered me about crime fiction is that it's generally about one or two people, but there's not much about society. I want to get away from that particular pattern: a lead, a supporting role and backdrop characters.
Stieg Larsson
#80. Do try The House by fresh new author, Susannah Mansfield, it's funny, sad and very different, you'll love the characters and the stories.
Susannah Mansfield
#81. Once upon a time there was war, and starvation, and death. Once upon a time we would kill our brothers and sisters, fearing for our own lives. Once upon a time the characters turned from us, and we wept. Now we do not war, nor do we fear, nor do we weep. We Redact.
F.D. Lee
#82. Violence can read like poetry. You just have to describe the act as if you're in love with the way your characters bleed.
F.K. Preston
#83. In fiction, every treachery and setback appears to serve some end: the characters learn and grow and come into their own. In life, it is not always clear that the hijacking of our plans is quite so provident or benign.
Azar Nafisi
#84. Characters are just extensions of my madness.
Mark Tilbury
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. I trust my characters. They know their stories better than I do.
Rayne Hall
#88. Conchpore is real. It is as real as Malgudi, Brahmpur, Lilliput or Macondo. And also as real as San Francisco, Madurai, Edinburgh, Gaborone or Tokyo. You know that fictional towns exist. You visit them all the time.
Indu Muralidharan
#89. I thought he was the man I'd been waiting for. A hero right out of Austen. The one who would finally make everything okay. Only he wasn't real. Like Austen's characters, he was fiction. Mr. Darcy broke my heart.
Beth Pattillo
#90. The best part of the fiction in many novels is the notice that the characters are imaginary.
Franklin P. Adams
#91. With writing fiction, I'm either not courageous enough or just not suited for telling truths in a more conventional way. As an actor, I inhabit those characters as I'm writing them.
Ray McKinnon
#92. I will never do 'Pulp Fiction 2,' but having said that, I could very well do other movies with these characters.
Quentin Tarantino
#93. Overpopulated fiction can be so confusing that readers put the story down. Under-populated novels can seem claustrophobic or boring. You want the right number of characters for your particular work.
Nancy Kress
#94. Nothing on earth in fiction is less interesting than characters under the influence of alcohol.
John L'Heureux
#95. The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell together, as quickly as possible.
Mark Twain
#96. I've never believed it's a fiction writer's job to create an exact replica of the past, a diorama the reader can step right into. But it is my responsibility to learn everything of the world I'm writing about, to become an expert in the politics and history that formed my characters' identities.
Molly Antopol
#97. When I write fiction, I never try to deliver a message; I just want to tell a story. But I admit that I want the story to be memorable and the characters to touch the reader's heart.
Isabel Allende
#98. Writing a book with completely fictitious characters is like running a democracy, centered around a capital state. You constantly live with the fear & suspicion that one of the characters will start an uncontrollable rebellion.
Shomprakash Sinha Roy
#99. The characters act for reasons that they can't control and, as readers, we have to believe in their motivations, their sense of choice and in the reality of their suffering, even though, deep down, we know it's all just puppetry on the part of the writer.
Johnny Rich
#100. I have found that in fiction one is freer to speak the truth, if only because in fiction the truth is not expected or required. You may easily disguise it, so that it is only recognized much later, when the story and the characters have faded into darkness.
Philip Sington
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