Quotes About Protagonists

#1. My protagonists are my mother's voice and the mind I had when I was thirteen.

Harold Brodkey

#2. Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition.

Pauline Kael

#3. The most important thing in the job is to make movies about women where they are characters that have consequences in the story. They can be villains, they can be protagonists, I don't care but their movements, their actions what they do in the plot has to actually matter.

Amy Pascal

#4. I have confronted theoretical positions whose protagonists claim that what I take to be historically produced characteristics of what is specifically modern are in fact the timelessly necessary characteristics of all and any moral judgment, of all and any selfhood.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#5. I believe young children in particular enjoy witnessing the survival of youthful protagonists against terrible odds. I think it's gratifying to the reader when you give young characters that kind of agency.

Robert Paul Weston

#6. Real literature was about psychological, emotional, and social truth as demonstrated by the actions and reflections of its protagonists; the novel was about character developed over time.

Julian Barnes

#7. At the heart of any successful film is a powerful story. And a story should be just that: a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end, powerful protagonists that audiences can identify with, and a dramatic arc that is able to capture and hold viewers' intellectual and emotional attention.

Julia Bacha

#8. I've been playing with this idea in my mind that the hero's journey that we're all taught as screenwriters may resonate more specifically for male protagonists and maybe even male viewers.

Jill Soloway

#9. We may be the protagonists of tragedy, but we are also the heroes of our most beautiful and thrilling experiences.

Shin Kyung-sook

#10. I think as women we've always been very used to growing up reading and identifying with male protagonists, especially in fantasy. There's a saying in publishing that girls will read about boys, but boys will only read about boys, and it's important to give women strong heroines.

Cassandra Clare

#11. Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.

Norman Mailer

#12. I think women have every right to feel like they're the protagonists in their own stories.

Kelly Sue DeConnick

#13. While books provided me with some escape from the mental and physical horrors of my early life, they were unreliable. Many times the protagonists suffered terribly and then died at the end.

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#14. My protagonists, male and female, are me.

Madeleine L'Engle

#15. An ambitious, surreal tale of the love between a young Arab girl sold into marriage and the orphan boy she adopts, 'Habibi' spans multiple eras of conflict and change, stretching the lifetimes of its two protagonists over many centuries.

G. Willow Wilson

#16. Doctor Mengele is such a powerful character historically, as powerful as Nazism itself, so these subjects always tend to be the protagonists. What I think is that despite this historical references, Wakolda or The German Doctor is a very intimate story.

Lucia Puenzo

#17. You have to go out of your way as a suspense novelist to find situations where the protagonists are somewhat helpless and in real danger.

Nelson DeMille

#18. Both of the twins exhibited a sort of prized Wisconsin Aryan-ness that excused them from blame for almost any caper. they looked liked the protagonists from a Disney movie but behaved like After School Specials.

Josh Kilmer-Purcell

#19. 'What It Is' was based on this class I've been teaching for 10 years - I wanted to write a book about writing that didn't mention stuff like story structure, protagonists, and all those things that we know about only because they already exist in stories.

Lynda Barry

#20. It seems to me that most good protagonists are both clever and resourceful. They are intelligent and can fix things, both little and big. They can come up with inventive solutions others would never think of.

Keren Woodward

#21. Over time, it's occurred to me that my protagonists all originate in some aspect of myself that I find myself questioning or feeling uncomfortable about.

Julia Glass

#22. I had the feeling that focusing on objects and telling a story through them would make my protagonists different from those in Western novels - more real, more quintessentially of Istanbul.

Orhan Pamuk

#23. We are the protagonists of our love story, not the spectators.

Matt Walsh

#24. 'Argo,' 'Lincoln,' and 'Zero Dark Thirty,' three films honored with Best Picture Oscar nominations, lionize their Washington-anchored protagonists as crafty, competent, and virtually incorruptible.

Ron Fournier

#25. Good story thrives on protagonists in pain.

Chuck Wendig

#26. I'm drawn to characters who bear similarities to the protagonists in myths and legends. ( ... )

Alan Lee

#27. I'm not interested in making movies only with female protagonists. I think it's ridiculous to think that a female director can't direct men. That makes no sense to me.

Elizabeth Banks

#28. Once you have a situation that is fresh, then you sort of believe in it and it becomes normal. So you do end up with protagonists that haven't been in other movies before.

Paul Schrader

#29. Join hands with other protagonists of love and peace and become a love commander.

Pooja Ruprell

#30. As Jane Austen might have put it: It is a truth universally acknowledged that young protagonists in search of adventure must ditch their parents.

Philip Pullman

#31. In fact, Guerra based his story on the diaries of two explorers, German Theodor Koch-Grunberg and American Richard Evans Schultes. There work is some of the only documentation of cultures that have since vanished. But Guerra did not want white men to be his protagonists.

Tom Cole

#32. You almost feel dirty for reading [Gillian Flynn's] books, like you've been forced to join your conscience with those of her morally murky protagonists.

Tarryn Fisher

#33. Characters stretching their legs in some calm haven generally don't make for interesting protagonists.

Darin Strauss

#34. You don't need to like your protagonists.

Anson Mount

#35. We are all protagonists, each and every one of us.

Dalton Frey

#36. It is a commonplace that the League of Nations is not yet-what its most enthusiastic protagonists intended it to be.

Hjalmar Branting

#37. In the past, I'll admit, I've enjoyed being compared to the protagonists in my screenplays.

Diablo Cody

#38. The idea in The Man that Would Be King was that the music should recreate all that majestic surrounding and emphasize the adventure, but also speak about the frustration or, rather said, the curse of both protagonists, even before happened what happens them.

Maurice Jarre

#39. Most traditional ghost stories feature rather hapless protagonists, who have nasty things happen to them.

Jonathan Stroud

#40. I've come to realize one thing, that stories are always bigger than we are, they happen to us and we are their protagonists without realizing it, but in the stories we live, we aren't the true protagonists, the true protagonist is the story itself.

Antonio Tabucchi

#41. If you run on lies long enough, they become your truth.
Such delicate fabric we conceal our motives in.
Colors to obscure the truth of our hearts.
No one is a bad person in his or her own mind.
We are all noble protagonists.

Rick Remender

#42. As women, we are the protagonists of our own personal novels. We are called upon to be the heroines of our own lives, not supporting characters.

Erin Blakemore

#43. Fiction is about human beings, first and foremost. (It's not impossible to write fiction with no human protagonists, but it's very hard to keep the reader interested ... )

Charles Stross

#44. Employing women as my primary protagonists has allowed me to step outside of myself, to distance myself from my own personality, far more easily than were I to look at events from a masculine perspective.

Tom Robbins

#45. I'm a girl, so I've experienced dismissal because I was a girl or because I write about girls: my book with a guy protagonist is treated as more literary and worthy than my other books with girl protagonists.

Sarah Rees Brennan

#46. Some undefined sorrow was hidden in the hearts of the protagonists as they stood in silence beneath the leafless trees and when the moment of farewell had come the kiss, which had been withheld by one, was given by both.

James Joyce

#47. I always think that it's wrong to put images of my protagonists on the cover of my novels because readers can identify with characters only if they are given the chance to imagine them independently.

Orhan Pamuk

#48. Most of 'Let the Great World Spin' is centered on the day in 1974 when Philippe Petit walked on a tightrope between the two towers of the World Trade Center, creating an astonishing spectacle that intersects with the lives of many of the novel's multiple protagonists.

Susan Barker

#49. I had a list of things that science fiction, particularly American science fiction, to me seemed to do with tedious regularity. One was to not have strong female protagonists. One was to envision the future, whatever it was, as America.

William Gibson

#50. They had the magic pill, the solution to the inertia and frustration that has plagued the great literary protagonists I'd related to all my life - be it Leopold Bloom, Alex Portnoy, or Piglet from Winnie the Pooh. As

Neil Strauss

#51. Women are never the protagonists; we're always reactionary against everything that's done to us. I like people who write for women that have got a bit more about them.

Neve McIntosh

#52. I've always read broadly: literary fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, chick lit, historical, dystopian, nonfiction, memoir. I've even read Westerns. I prefer female protagonists.

Sandra Cisneros

#53. Since so many romantic comedies vary little in their storyline, the success or failure of such movies depends largely on whether we believe in the relationship of the protagonists.

Mariella Frostrup

#54. The Greeks were the first intellectualists. In a world where the irrational had played the chief role, they came forward as the protagonists of the mind.

Edith Hamilton

#55. It was great to essentially have two protagonists where you're sympathies could go back and forth between the two of them, throughout the season.

Tony Goldwyn

#56. For the blockbusters, people were always telling me that if you write female protagonists, the boys won't go, so you have to put the boys' stuff in it to get everybody. I write for people from 8 to 80, and that's not easy.

Linda Woolverton

#57. But protagonists are protagonists and heroes are heroes.

David Baldacci

#58. I do think that I have a more flexible view of the interactions between people, and between human and non-human protagonists, humans and their landscapes.

Karen Russell

#59. I loved films of the '70s with those antihero protagonists who you don't know if you can get behind because their behavior is really questionable.

Nicholas Jarecki

#60. Speaking generally, I think it's useful to acknowledge explicitly the power imbalance between a journalist and the protagonists in a story about poor people, even to make that imbalance part of the story - and to redress it, narratively, where you can.

William Finnegan

#61. That's what protagonists do. They work hard, they have a conflict, they overcome the obstacles.

Jon Heder

#62. I find myself writing protagonists who do feel pretty cut off from others but who want to make connections and aren't very good at it.

Leni Zumas

#63. To me there's no difference between writing YA and adult except that in YA I make the book a little shorter and the protagonists are teens. The difference is in the readers.

Charles De Lint

#64. Is it unprecedented for two goalkeepers employed in a match comprising seven goals to be the fixture's most competent protagonists?

Pete Gill

#65. We may think of ourselves as static anti-heroes, but in reality we're dynamic protagonists just waiting for our courage to kick in.

Justin Alcala

#66. I really get fired up with female protagonists. I can really feel the difference in myself when I am writing a script that has a woman at the center.

Linda Woolverton

#67. In most shows, there's usually a hero or a protagonist, and even if there are multiple heroes or protagonists, most shows try and make it so you really always know who's the good guy and who's the bad guy.

Jill Soloway

#68. Look at the Coen brothers. All their minor characters are as interesting as their protagonists. If the smaller characters are well-written, the whole world of the film becomes enriched. It's not the size of the thing, but the detail.

Brendan Gleeson

#69. I'm interested in flawed protagonists. I was raised on them.

Laura Dern

#70. My father used to say that all protagonists were versions of the author who wrote them - even if it meant the author had to acknowledge a side of himself that he did not know existed. It just required courage.

Catherine Lowell

#71. Of course I consider myself a Jewish writer - I am one! All of the protagonists in my five books have been Jewish, and I wouldn't be surprised if all my future main characters were as well.

Lauren Weisberger

#72. With the crime novels, it's delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. It's like having a fictitious family.

John Banville

#73. I like when people question if the characters are really villains or protagonists. These types are very interesting to write about.

Jack Higgins

#74. Make the audience wonder what's going on by putting them in the same position as the protagonist.

David Mamet

#75. Nobody is ever just a straight up protagonist or antagonist - everybody's morally ambiguous.

Cheyenne Jackson

#76. As long as the protagonist wants something, the audience will want something.

David Mamet

#77. Dogwood Blues by Brenda Sutton Rose is a masterful work of classic small-town fiction.

Janice Daugharty

#78. Georgia Author Brenda Sutton Rose captures some of the conflicted and captivating characters of a rapidly changing South.

Janisse Ray

#79. It is the objective of the protagonist that keeps us in our seats.

David Mamet

#80. Though the inspiration for my songs almost always comes from things that are happening around me, I am definitely not always the protagonist in the songs.

Thalia Zedek

#81. We're a lively, healthy and active group. This doesn't happen to the likes of us.

Sophia Bar-Lev

#82. No lies, my love, no lies between us.

T. Frohock

#83. I read the story of Red Riding Hood today. I think the wolf was the most interesting character in it. Red Riding Hood was a stupid little thing so easily fooled.

L.M. Montgomery

#84. The nature of the universe probably depends heavily on who is the actual protagonist. Lately I've been suspecting it's one of my cats.

Wil McCarthy

#85. The glory of the protagonist is always paid for
by a lot of secondary characters

Tony Hoagland