Top 70 Quotes About Characterization
#1. 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
#2. I just adore Kate Winslet. I love her because you're never aware of all the stuff that's going into her characterization and, yet, she completely transforms.
Anna Torv
#3. There are no new plots, but there are plenty of fresh new characters with whom you can grab the reader. Characterization is the key to successful commercial fiction. Characterization starts with goal, motivation, and conflict. Character
Debra Dixon
#4. I think I'm very strong at dialogue, I think I'm very strong in characterization. I think sometimes I use dialogue and character work to cover weaknesses in my plotting.
Kelly Sue DeConnick
#5. Characterization is an accident that flows out of action and dialogue.
Jack Woodford
#6. The instinct to impersonate produces the actor; the desire to provide pleasure by impersonations produces the playwright; the desire to provide this pleasure with adequate characterization and dialogue memorable in itself produces dramatic literature.
George Pierce Baker
#7. An attempt to write nothing but characterization will soon bog down; I for one don't want to have somebody tell me about someone else.
Daniel Keys Moran
#8. The only time that I've adopted characterization again since that point, for my own albums, has been an album called "Outside" that I did with Brian Eno .
David Bowie
#9. Characterization in a play is like a blank check which the dramatist accords to the actor for him to fill in.
Thornton Wilder
#10. Hegel's philosophy is very difficult - he is, I should say, the hardest to understand of all the great philosophers. Before entering on any detail, a general characterization may prove helpful.
Bertrand Russell
#11. I will never forget the pleasure and instruction I derived from working with a true master of his art, such as Edward G. Robinson was - and is. Surely his record for versatility, studied characterization - ranging from modern colloquial to the classics - and artistic integrity is unsurpassed.
Douglas Fairbanks Jr.
#12. I've never bought into any sort of hard and fast, this-box/that-box characterization. People are individuals. Yes, they may be expected to be a particular way. But that doesn't mean they're going to be that way.
Margaret Atwood
#13. I think with any characterization there's a point where you empathize, no matter how much of a deviance his or her actions may be from your understanding of humanity.
Benedict Cumberbatch
#14. I need it all: in-depth characterization, fantastic/warped world building, a plot that could out-race Secretariat, and a 'voice.' I need to hear a uniqueness in the author's voice.
Rob Thurman
#15. Characterization requires a constant back-and-forth between the exterior events of the story and the inner life of the character.
David Corbett
#16. You can use the fun of the genre, but I also really wanted to come at it from the point of view of some really complex characterization. There was a lot that I wanted it to do, and I wanted it to be fun. It's fun, but it's not simple fun.
Adrian Hodges
#17. Characterization requires self-knowledge, insight into human nature ... it is more than impersonation.
Leon Surmelian
#18. I'm not interested in plots. I'm interested only in the characterization of people and what they do.
Erskine Caldwell
#19. BUT TRANSFORMERS ROTF(L) SUCKS BECAUSE IT IS A TERRIBLY TOLD STORY WITH ENDLESS BLOAT, NO MOMENTUM, PAPER THIN CHARACTERIZATION, NO CHARACTER CONSISTENCY, NO ACTUAL RELATIONSHIPS, POORLY ARTICULATED CONFLICTS, ZERO SENSE OF DRAMA, A WEIRD-AS-HELL TONE, AND A WHOLE LOT OF SEXISM AND RACISM TO BOOT.
Film Crit Hulk!
#20. The only thing that surprises me is the characterization of teachers as lazy and greedy. Only someone with very little understanding of what teaching requires would say such a thing.
Taylor Mali
#21. My theory of characterization is basically this: Put some dirt on a hero, and put some sunshine on the villain, one brush stroke of beauty on the villain.
Justin Cronin
#22. Whether you're writing a horror show or a James Bond film, I think what bubbles beneath is interesting characterization. The colors that emerge through storytelling is what a dramatist does. There's always got to be something bubbling underneath that will erupt at some point.
John Logan
#23. How could this be? - I thought. - Characterization is my strength!
Jaclyn Dolamore
#24. I think my wife would take objection to any characterization of me as perfect.
Peter Blair Henry
#25. But eventually I moved the portraiture into the smaller clay things which gave them more of a caricature look to them, rather than a characterization.
Joe Fafard
#26. I love working fictional characters into a piece of history. It plays to my strengths, which are characterization and dialogue, and assists me in my admitted weakness, plot.
Laurie Graham
#27. 'True Detective' is a densely layered work with resonant details and symbology and rich characterization under the guise of one of the forms of this mystery genre. That's what we shoot for.
Nic Pizzolatto
#28. Reading across disciplinary categories in this way provides one of the main organizing logics of this book because instinct's presence, absence, and characterization within different disciplines is in itself instructive about the changes to sexuality taking place around the turn of the century.
Kathleen Frederickson
#29. I'm trying to make the case that the church can indeed, from within its own resources, move out of a false, and often a hateful, characterization of and set of attitudes toward gay and lesbian people.
James Alison
#30. I like dramatic ballets, particularly if they're ballets in which I have a chance to go from one extreme of style or characterization to another.
Suzanne Farrell
#31. Carver's best book yet! FROM A CHANGELING STAR combines deft characterization and fascinating extrapolation into a complex, compulsively readable thriller. I wish all science fiction novels could be this good.
Craig Shaw Gardner
#32. The characterization of actions allegedly prior to any narrative form being imposed upon them will always turn out to be the presentation of what are plainly the disjointed parts of some possible narrative.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#33. As a reader I like both great characterization and fast moving plots. The challenge is to balance the both and not compromise one for the other.
Tobsha Learner
#34. What?' Noah looked at me, all innocence.
'You're not shy.'
'No?'
'No,' I said, narrowing my eyes. 'And pretending to be makes you look like a jackass.'
Noah feigned offense. 'You've wounded me to the core with your profane characterization.'
'Pass the tissues.
Michelle Hodkin
#35. Characterization is not divorced from plot, not a coat of paint you slap on after the structure of events is already built. Rather characterization is inseparable from plot.
Nancy Kress
#36. I'm very disturbed at the picture that was painted by Senator Ted Kennedy that Samuel Alito is not a man of his word, that he is dishonest. The implication that he is not reliable I don't think is a fair characterization of what I've read.
Tom Coburn
#37. 20 See the naive characterization of Backe in J. K. Galbraith, 'Germany was Badly Run', Fortune (December 1945), 177.
Anonymous
#38. The best characterization is provided by the product of this religious education, the Jew himself. His life is only of this world, and his spirit is inwardly as alien to true Christianity as his nature two thousand years previous was to the great founder of the new doctrine.
Adolf Hitler
#39. But this encompassment of her own characterization, based on shreds of convention, peopled by phantoms and voices antipathetic to her, was a sorry and mistaken creation of Tess's fancy - a cloud of moral hobgoblins by which she was terrified without reason.
Thomas Hardy
#40. The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.
Alfred North Whitehead
#41. A good novel is an indivisible sum: every scene, sequence and passage of a good novel has to involve, contribute to and advance all three of its major attributes: theme, plot, characterization.
Ayn Rand
#42. Despite the characterization of some that teaching is an easy job, with short hours and summers off, the fact is that successful, dedicated teachers in the U.S. work long hours for little pay and, in many cases, insufficient support from their leadership.
Andreas Schleicher
#43. Sometimes after a compliment about my characterization skills, I'm asked if I model my characters on real people. Emphatically, no. And sort of, yes.
Brent Weeks
#44. In art and life we're always reading bodies and behaviors (and skies and skylines or whatever), constructing brief and shifting coherences, and I guess I want to capture that process of characterization and re-characterization instead of offering up a few stable, easily-summarized individuals.
Ben Lerner
#45. My feeling for reality TV isn't ironic, guilty, or apologetic. Reality TV is one of the few remaining modes of popular entertainment in which characterization is permitted as plot.
Andrea Seigel
#46. Acting is characterization, the process of two entities merging-the actor and the role.
George C. Scott
#47. Characterization is integral to the theatrical experience.
Robert Ludlum
#48. When the drama attains a characterization which makes the play a revelation of human conduct and a dialogue which characterizes yet pleases for itself, we reach dramatic literature.
George Pierce Baker
#50. A good American makes propaganda for whatever existence has forced him to become.
Saul Bellow
#51. Favoring 'resolution' the way we do, it is hard for us men to write great love stories. Why?, because we want to tell too much. We aren't satisfied unless at the end of the story the characters are lying there, panting.
Roman Payne
#52. When people really hate one another, the tension within them can sometimes make itself felt throughout a room, like atmospheric waves, first hot, then cold, wafted backwards and forwards as if in an invisible process of air conditioning, creating a pervasive physical disturbance.
Anthony Powell
#53. You will only thrive when you are allowed to be what you are.
Chris Dee
#54. She is pure Alice in Wonderland, and her appearance and demeanor are a nicely judged mix of the Red Queen and a Flamingo.
Truman Capote
#56. You are the wolf that howls and bites. i am the mustang that nuzzles the hand People know they can work with me. With you? Hell, kill or be killed.
Pierce Brown
#57. Mackay had just failed to tip the coat-check girl and was now blinking and working his arms into a too-small trench coat; he looked like a seagull trying to lift up out of an oil spill.
Isabel Fonseca
#58. You say just, Ellis says flatly. There is no just with Edward Monkford. Nothing's more important to him than getting his own way.
J.P. Delaney
#59. She wore a black pantsuit with a white silk shirt that had an almost metallic sheen to it. He wondered whom she had already gone into mourning for; then he reminded himself that she was the type of woman who mourned damaged reputations and lost opportunities, not human beings.
Christopher Rice
#60. You could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkling from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then.
Thomas Hardy
#61. I'll tell you something that was unusual, though. When most people are caught lying to the police, they cave in pretty quickly. Emma's response was to tell another lie. It might have been planted in her head by her brief, but even so that's not a common reaction.
J.P. Delaney
#63. There is tremendous life and personality in a name. It should be at least as agonized over as any character trait.
Travis Beacham
#64. He was too many things at once - a boy, a man, and everything in between - and the differing parts of himself seldom came into balance. She found him attractive in that way. Yet the perception saddened her: she herself wasn't too many things, but too few.
Stephen R. Donaldson
#65. I've committed to nothing ... and that's just suicide ... by tiny, tiny increments.
Nick Hornby
#66. Dwarves are not heroes, but a calculating folk with a great idea of the value of money; some are tricky and treacherous and pretty bad lots; some are not but are decent enough people like Thorin and Company, if you don't expect too much.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#67. That was Emma - she'd have enjoyed knowing she had something like that, something that could blow her whole fucking life and mine apart if it came out. Her little bit of power.
J.P. Delaney
#69. 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
#70. Clever's not enough to hold me - I want characters who are more than devices to be moved about for Effect.
Laura Anne Gilman
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
