Top 52 Quotes About Characters In Literature
#1. I would much rather read a book about Ty Cobb, who was quite possibly a sociopath. It makes for more interesting copy. Some of the most memorable characters in literature were villains.
Jonathan Weeks
#2. Worse, the bodies of women, minorities, children, disenfranchised bodies (prisoners, so-called nut cases, etc ... ) and their truths don't "count" as either present and important in society or worth Pulitzer prizes as characters in literature.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#3. There are lots of unlikable characters in literature. It doesn't mean they're not fascinating.
Lynne Tillman
#4. The writer of fiction is not a scholar but an artist impacted emotionally by characters from life, who then strives to present these in his works. These characters present us with human truth but do not necessarily represent social truth.
Alaa Al Aswany
#5. Real people are made out of a whole lot of things - flesh, bone, blood, nerves, stuff like that. Literary people are made out of words.
Thomas C. Foster
#6. Please,Tana,please.' -lots of characters in The Coldest Girl in Coldtown
Holly Black
#7. In general there should be gay characters in YA because a) surprise, there are gay folks everywhere and b) in my opinion as a father, there's not a damn thing wrong with my child encountering gay folks in her literature, because see point a).
John Scalzi
#8. The truth is, everything ultimately comes down to the relationship between the reader and the writer and the characters. Does or does not a character address moral being in a universal and important way? If it does, then it's literature.
Whitley Strieber
#9. Literature had taken possession even of her memories. She was matching him, presumably, with certain characters in the old novels ...
Virginia Woolf
#10. What I can say is that all my characters are searching for their souls, because they are my mirrors. I'm someone who is constantly trying to understand my place in the world, and literature is the best way that I found in order to see myself.
Paulo Coelho
#11. The problem with 'the crown jewel of Chinese literature' [Dream of the Red Chamber] is that it has two thousand pages and an equal number of characters, and the hero is an effeminate ass who should have either been spanked or decapitated, both ends being equally objectionable.
Barry Hughart
#12. Alas, two men are often necessary to provide a woman with a perfect lover, just as in literature a writer composes a type only by employing the singularities of several similar characters.
Honore De Balzac
#13. Q: What literary complexities do you find most interesting? That is, what do you like most to "solve," so to speak, as a novelist?
A: One wishes to create characters who will speak directly to the minds of comparative literature professors and intelligent book reviewers.
Gilbert Sorrentino
#14. I have a vision of artists putting into film, drama, literature, music, and paintings great themes and great characters from the Book of Mormon.
Ezra Taft Benson
#15. It is difficult when reading the description of certain fictional characters not at the same time to imagine the real-life acquaintances who they most closely, if often unexpectedly, resemble.
Alain De Botton
#16. Art should walk a tightrope. That's what art should be. Art should be dangerous. You can't be scared to say something with it. People love to talk about how comics are real art and real literature, so why not use these characters to talk about real things, even if it is dangerous?
Jeff Lemire
#17. It isn't as if a writer merely records life as it unfurls. Reality does not automatically transcribe as literature; real people are not shapely, compelling characters to be harvested. Charming facts and sharp observations rarely slide seamlessly into whatever narrative is at hand.
Michelle Huneven
#18. The advantage of literature over life is that its characters are clearly defined, and act consistently.
Jerome K. Jerome
#19. literature and opera are full of
characters who die for love:
i stay alive for her.
- Excerpt from "No Longer A Teenager
Gerald Locklin
#20. 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,
#22. There's a wealth of literature out there which, hopefully, will be, you know, exploded in the future, and I personally find it very rewarding to be involved with classic storytelling, and sort of legendary characters.
Sean Bean
#23. I'm not writing great literature. I'm writing commercial fiction for people to enjoy the stories and to like the characters.
Kathy Reichs
#24. I was given the ability to create stories and characters. That's my part of the long chain of writers, publishers, agents, booksellers, librarians, and a host of others who eventually deliver literature to the world. I want to do for others what Eudora Welty did for me.
Karl Marlantes
#25. When the river meets the sea, he dies! Because the character of the river is to flow and when the character dies, everything dies!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#26. There's no shortage of orphans in 19th-century literature, but it's hard to find a single happy, communicative, functional parental relationship in the whole of 'Great Expectations,' even among the minor characters.
David Nicholls
#27. ...because there's a secret order. The books, you can't place them random. The other day I put Cervantes next to Tolstoj.
And I thought, if close to Anna Karenina we have Don Quixote, sure the latter will do his best to save her.
Ettore Scola
#28. Dostoyevsky wrote of the unconscious as if it were conscious; that is in reality the reason why his characters seem 'pathological', while they are only visualized more clearly than any other figures in imaginative literature ... He was in the rank in which we set Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe.
Edwin Muir
#29. 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
#30. Once
God wrote a story
that shook the heaven to the very core.
Love was the only language used;
You and I
were the only characters.
Subhan Zein
#31. 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
#32. 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
#34. 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
#35. Well, the thing about great fictional characters from literature, and the reason that they're constantly turned into characters in movies, is that they completely speak to what makes people human.
Keira Knightley
#36. The glory of the protagonist is always paid for
by a lot of secondary characters
Tony Hoagland
#37. Literature could turn you into an asshole: he'd learned that teaching grad-school seminars. It could teach you to treat real people the way you did characters, as instruments of your own intellectual pleasure, cadavers on which to practice your critical faculties.
Chad Harbach
#38. Growing up, I loved the tale of Peter Rabbit and also books on Pippi Longstocking. Pippi was a girl who had so much fun and was very daring. My sons loved all the Dr. Seuss books
Soraya Diase Coffelt
#39. 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
#40. I've grown up well, partly because there weren't great girls' literature - Nancy Drew, maybe - but there weren't things. So there was Huck Finn and "Spin And Marty." The boys characters were interesting and you lived through them when you're watching it.
Meryl Streep
#41. Poetry is a tool for writers to create literature in different forms of expression and messages.
Vanessa M Chattman
#42. "Someone": I understood that this was a character who in her own life her voice hadn't much been heard and in literature her life isn't much heard. For me, it was resisting all the more appealing characters and listening to the voice that hadn't been much heard from.
Alice McDermott
#43. 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
#44. As for most writers, language is vital for me: a writer's ability to render a fictional world - characters, landscape, emotions - into something original that alters or deepens my understanding of both literature and life.
Dinaw Mengestu
#45. To recount modern life one has to have characters with iPads and smart phones who take trains and planes, and to be aware how this alters consciousness, identity, and the kind of experiences people have. They are constantly exposed to contact from everyone they know and many they don't.
Tim Parks
#46. All great characters, great icons, in literature are a bit of a riddle, and that's the reason we go back to them over and over.
David Lagercrantz
#47. The naturalistic literature of this country has reached such a state that no family of characters is considered true to life whichdoes not include at least two hypochondriacs, one sadist, and one old man who spills food down the front of his vest.
Robert Benchley
#48. Sometimes, authors' descriptions of unique fictional characters are like mirrors that reflect the readers image back.
Ben Abix
#49. 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
#50. Schools provide safe spaces to talk about controversial issues, and literature presents characters portraying human experience in all its richness and contradictoriness.
Julia Alvarez
#51. Literature doesn't have a country. Shakespeare is an African writer. His Falstaff, for example, is very African in his appetite for life, his largeness of spirit. The characters of Turgenev are ghetto dwellers. Dickens characters are Nigerians.
Ben Okri
#52. All deeply good characters in imaginative literature, have to be, as it were, diluted with weakness or eccentricity; for only on such conditions are they comprehensible by readers and expressible by writers. Aldous Huxley
Nicholas Murray
