Top 100 Quotes About Story Characters
#1. Short story characters, mine anyway, are usually driven by impulse, not so much by their histories and the choices that they have to make.
Charles Baxter
#2. I usually grow sick of my short-story characters and think, 'I never want to see you again.'
Lorrie Moore
#3. I think kids want the same thing from a book that adults want - a fast-paced story, characters worth caring about, humor, surprises, and mystery. A good book always keeps you asking questions, and makes you keep turning pages so you can find out the answers.
Rick Riordan
#4. You'd think God would come right out and tell us what to do in the Bible, but He doesn't. He mostly tells stories, and He rarely stops the story to say what the point is. He just lets the characters and conflict hang in the air like smoke.
Donald Miller
#5. I write - and read - for the sake of the story ... My basic test for any story is: 'Would I want to meet these characters and observe these events in real life? Is this story an experience worth living through for its own sake? Is the pleasure of contemplating these characters an end itself?
Ayn Rand
#6. 'Push' had a story, 'The Paperboy' story you could just throw up in the air and shoot holes through the book because the story wasn't as strong. But I felt the characters were stronger in 'The Paperboy'; they were vivid.
Lee Daniels
#7. I like to let the story flesh itself out, and usually, the characters make their own decisions as things get under way. Dialogue especially seems to write itself once I'm familiar with the characters and their backgrounds.
Victoria Aveyard
#8. They are young, full of ambition and dreams; they are still unable to imagine that there might be a story in the world in which they are not the main characters.
Juan Gomez Barcena
#9. I hate SF books that think all you need to make a book is cool technology and mind-bending ideas without a decent plot or characters. And I hate when fantasy books are allowed to ramble off into five hundred page diatribes which don't advance the story one bit.
Chris Wooding
#10. I love being able to create characters, give them problems, and make sure everything turns out right in the end. Writing gives me limitless opportunity to study the human condition, and a love story with a positive ending always lifts my spirits and warms my heart.
Jennie Adams
#11. I always plan the whole story in some detail, long before I start writing the actual thing. But even doing that, I find that there is plenty of room for spontaneity. Often the characters will lead the story off in a direction I hadn't originally intended!
Raymond Buckland
#12. As our characters in our 'X-FORCE' began to push at the boundaries of what 'X-FORCE' was, it made perfect story sense for the team to change their name.
Peter Milligan
#13. When I start, I have a feeling for the characters, and maybe the shape of the story. Sometimes I might even have the last sentence in mind. But, no book I've ever written has ever ended the way I thought it would. Characters disappear, others come forward. Once you start writing, everything changes.
Paul Auster
#14. My favorite novels allow me to imagine the characters afterward and what happened, and that I've witnessed a really great story, where the world goes on.
J.H. Wyman
#15. 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
#16. I think the business of writing a great deal of it is the business of paying attention to your characters, to the world they live in, to the story you have to tell, but just a kind of deep attention and out of that if you pay attention properly the story will tell you what it needs.
Salman Rushdie
#17. Part of the beauty of a long-format story is that the characters become as much yours as they are mine, and you dream of them in a different way than I do.
Joshua Jackson
#18. You know, I've always wrote my best stuff when it takes me hardly any time at all. Actually I wrote ... this is actually a really funny story ... 'Ghost Of Vincent Price', I've been wanting to write a song about Vincent Price coz he's one of my favorite characters of all time.
Wednesday 13
#19. It's important to find characters that share sympathy with a young audience, not just in the story but their role in the world.
Tim Crouch
#20. On some level, every story draws something from life experiences. Most of the time, it's just a matter of me pulling bits and pieces of my own past to help give characters or settings a little more life.
Cullen Bunn
#21. Sometimes you have to go places with characters and emotions within yourself you don't want to do, but you have a duty to the story and as a storyteller to do it.
Hugh Jackman
#22. I never try to give a message in my books. It's about living with characters long enough to hear their voices and let them tell me the story. Sometimes I would love to have a happy ending, and it doesn't happen because the character or the story leads me in another direction.
Isabel Allende
#23. Actors want to work. Give them characters they want to play, or a story they want to tell, and hopefully the budget will follow.
Lorene Scafaria
#24. My first two novels were set in the past, and that freed me up in a lot of ways; it allowed me to find my way into my story and my characters through research.
Jennifer Gilmore
#25. Stories and novels consist of three parts: narration, which moves the story from point A to point B and finally to point Z; description, which creates a sensory reality for the reader; and dialogue, which brings characters to life through their speech.
Stephen King
#26. The story is always in service to the characters, and is only as long or short, or neat or ragged as it needs to be.
Stewart O'Nan
#27. I'm a child of the literary bent. I don't want to see 140 characters. I want to see a story.
Joanne Kelly
#28. It's the only way I really know how to tell the story is to be able to kind of live through the characters. So when I find something that resonates with me, it's usually because it cuts to something very real inside of me; something that I've gone through or experienced.
Rob Reiner
#29. You are the main character in the story of your life, but other people are the main characters of their own lives. And sometimes you can find healing just by playing a supporting role in someone else's experience.
Timothy Kurek
#30. 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
#31. Personally, I am thrilled that I can now let my characters clasp a rosary, mention confession or invoke the intercession of a saint without it being edited out of my story.
Regina Doman
#32. It's a real challenge to complete a story arc and end up with a cool punchline in 120 characters.
Mark Hoppus
#33. Along with the other animals, the stones, the trees, and the clouds, we ourselves are characters within a huge story that is visibly unfolding all around us, participants within the vast imagination, or Dreaming, of the world.
David Abram
#34. But keep characters in propinquity long enough and a story will always develop a plot.
Keith Miller
#35. I love characters songs and I love to fit into a story. I love singing through a character's journey.
Katie Finneran
#36. Authors have to write for their characters, for who they are, that's the strength of books. Don't worry about censors. Just write the story you need to tell and the rewards will come.
Ellen Hopkins
#37. When you close the book, does the story end? No! That's such a bland way to read. Every story goes on forever in our imaginations, and its characters live on.
Mizuki Nomura
#38. I write for the kid in me ... Often when I'm working on a story, I'll find myself laughing at something my characters have done, or even being surprised at where they've taken the story. It's as if they have a life all their own. What I do is create them and then let them go on to entertain me ...
Elvira Woodruff
#39. I rarely return to characters. My characters, at least most of them, are much more a part of that superorganism that is the story than separate and independent creatures.
Etgar Keret
#40. I'd like to be taken in charge of as an actor, not to be abandoned with asinine dialogue and meaningless actions or stereotyped characters. I'd like to feel like I'm in a character driven story.
Xavier Dolan
#41. When I watch cop shows, I really enjoy them because you can really follow the story and get involved, and the characters are always really interesting.
Vicky McClure
#42. I love to have real people of history interact with my fictional characters. History gives me the plot. I research the period meticulously, and then I blend in a romantic and sensual love story to give it balance. The heavier the history, the more romantic the couple must be.
Virginia Henley
#43. I become my characters, and then try to allow events in the story to take their own course. I try not to play God, but to let them work out their own destiny.
Michael Morpurgo
#44. Let memories of your own hometown flow back to you as you read this fascinating story, "A Place called Gouyave," about the author's recollection of the characters, stories and the lessons learnt in his hometown during his youth on the Caribbean island of Grenada.
Collis Decoteau
#45. The Little Friend is a long book. It's also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story.
Donna Tartt
#46. I feel like the only reason we're able to find some of these unique ideas, characters, and story twists is through discovery. And, by definition, 'discovery' means you don't know the answer when you start.
Ed Catmull
#47. When you are dealing with approximately two-plus hours every few years to do a story, you don't have the luxury of having excessive screen time to explore, in detail and in-depth, lots of other subsidiary or ancillary supporting characters.
Michael Uslan
#48. Everything is a story, a narrative, a sequence of events with characters communicating an emotional content.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#49. The best part of re-working a story is falling in love with the characters all over again.
M.E. Tudor
#50. To combine telling an interesting story with brilliantly written characters is the most difficult thing to do.
Greg McHugh
#51. I believe that if the story is fleshed out and the characters more believable, the reader is more likely to take the journey with them. In addition, the plot can be more complex. My characters are very real to me, and I want each of my characters to be different.
Michael Robotham
#52. First: Character is king. There are probably fewer than six books every century remembered specifically for their plots. People remember characters. Same with television. Who remembers the Lone Ranger? Everybody. Who remembers any actual Lone Ranger story lines? Nobody.
Lee Child
#53. Mark Spitz didn't ask about Harry. You never asked about the characters that disappeared from a Last Night story. You knew the answer. The plague had a knack for narrative closure.
Colson Whitehead
#54. Certainly, I read a lot and follow the news. But as a writer, I am not interested in a political story. I am searching for the humanity of the characters. I never set out to write a book about an 'issue.'
Cristina Henriquez
#55. So if you want to have a great video game-based movie you have to keep the mood of the game, use the normal character setup - but you have to flesh out the story and provide more background for the characters.
Uwe Boll
#56. Characters are so important to a story that they actually decide where the story is going. When I write, I know my characters. I know how things are going to end, and I know some important incidents along the way.
E.L. Konigsburg
#57. Sometimes I write from the point of view of characters whom I would dislike as people, not as a perverse exercise, but because this cracks the story open and makes me see it in a way I would not see it naturally.
Mary Gaitskill
#58. You and I are characters in God's Story, handmade by Him. Every character serves a purpose.
Randy Alcorn
#59. I think the success of 'Downton' is partly because there are effectively 18 leading characters, all given equal importance, so it's enormously involving on many levels. But also, it's a new story. It's not like Dickens or Austen, where everyone knows the denouement.
Michelle Dockery
#60. I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story.
G.K. Chesterton
#61. It's difficult from one story to jump in another story, 2 stories are okay for one hour. But more and more characters you start losing the link. (Thriller 2)
Deyth Banger
#62. The most crucial thing is to learn the craft: how to string sentences together, how to make your dialogue sound like real people, how to properly pace a story, how to develop interesting characters.
Stephen Coonts
#63. One of the things I've found most challenging about writing a multibook series is keeping it fresh and evolving while still delivering the familiarity that keeps longtime fans devoted to the characters and story world.
Tina St. John
#64. 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
#65. Discover everything about your characters that you can before you write your story. If you get stuck at any point, they will write your dialog for you.
Michael J. Kannengieser
#66. It's sort of an organic process when you're adapting any book, not even just your own. You want to preserve the heart of the story and you want to preserve who the characters are, but film requires a lot of compression.
Jonathan Tropper
#67. I'm not first and foremost interested in story and the what-happens, but I'm interested in who's telling it and how they're telling it and the effects of whatever happened on the characters and the people.
Amy Hempel
#68. People who were more concerned with themselves and looking good to their readers then they were with the characters sacrificed a series for the sake of a story.
Len Wein
#69. Don't set pen to paper until you know your main characters inside out. Create files detailing their appearances, likes, dislikes, and personal background. You may not use all the information, but it is a crucial step in planning your story.
Jojo Moyes
#70. I am one man with a laptop. When I give the world my characters, it's because I don't want to keep them for myself. You don't like what I made them do? Fucking tell me I'm wrong! Rewrite the story. Throw in a new plot twist. Make up your own ending.
J.C. Lillis
#71. I am not an analytical writer. Once I flesh out my characters and decide on the elements of my plot, the story unfolds in my head almost as though it was a movie reel.
Susan Carroll
#72. I'm not really a plot writer - I'm more interested in the characters and sort of small events that propel the story forward.
Sara Zarr
#73. The main thing that I learned from editing is that most people, when they're making a film, they start too early into the story. They will try to set up the characters, they will try to establish things before the plot actually starts.
Steven Zaillian
#74. All you can do is focus on telling the best story you can with compelling characters. If you do it right, it will endure. If you do it wrong, it won't.
J. Michael Straczynski
#75. With historicals, the research is half the fun. Contemporaries are especially easy. People are right out there in front of you; you meet them every day. You can concentrate wholly on the story and characters.
Heather Graham Pozzessere
#76. What a trajedy to be a martyr for love, yet we worship the characters anyways because they remind us of how we struggled.
Shannon L. Alder
#77. I once started a detective story to make money-but I couldn't get the murder to take place! At the end of three chapters I was still describing the characters and the milieu, so I thought, this is not going to work. No corpse!
Mary McCarthy
#78. 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
#79. I think all the characters in 'American Horror Story,' which is why I love it, are looking for some sense of meaning, and also it's their form of happiness.
Denis O'Hare
#80. While the characters drive the epic story of Robotech, it's the robotic mecha that capture the imagination.
Tommy Yune
#81. I follow where the story goes. Always. Every time. Sometimes it goes places where I'm not comfortable ... it's at those times that I just listen to my characters, hold on with both hands, and trust that my readers won't lynch me later.
Dennis Sharpe
#82. It is always a tense moment for an author to see how someone hasillustrated his or her story, because the author has lived for so long with these characters, sometimes for years.
Pat Mora
#84. I love writing, and I love the solitude of the writing, in that you're just sitting there creating something from nothing, or a new story for characters you love and care about.
John Wells
#85. As the story unfolded, the cast of characters changed to match it.
Warren Spector
#86. I like dialogue in novels. I wanted to avoid laying history on with a trowel - appearing to be lecturing, as opposed to the characters lecturing their children or students. Dialogue can humanise the story and make it go down somewhat more smoothly.
Elliot Perlman
#87. All I can guess is that when I write, I forget that it's not real. I'm living the story, and I think people can read that sincerity about the characters. They are real to me while I'm writing them, and I think that makes them real to the readers as well.
Stephenie Meyer
#88. Accept the unknown. There are no secondary characters. Each one is silhouetted against the sky. All have the same stature. Within a given story some simply occupy more space.
John Berger
#89. The characters and action in this story are purely fictitious. Should the description of certain journalistic practices result in a resemblance to the practices of Bild-Zeitung, such resemblance is neither intentional, nor fortuitous, but unavoidable.
Heinrich Boll
#90. I think love is a great catalyst for many characters to further the story or their own growth.
Keri Russell
#91. The hours go by without my knowing it. Sitting there I'm wandering in countries I can see every detail of
I'm playing a role in the story I'm reading. I actually feel I'm the characters
I live and breathe them.
Gustave Flaubert
#92. The number 1 thing that I don't want to see in a story is when characters exist simply to be proven wrong.
Brandon Sanderson
#93. I start with the story, almost in the old campfire sense, and the story leads to both the characters, which actors should best be cast in this story, and the language. The choice of words, more than anything else, creates the feeling that the story gives off.
Donald E. Westlake
#94. Basically the children who watch it just see the little characters they love, and so they're not discerning about whether it looks great or it's a great story or anything.
Don Bluth
#95. I approach film no differently than I approach a role. I want to make sure the movie is right, the characters are right, I can really bring something to it as a visionary, a storyteller. It's great to point a camera, but can you tell a story?
Larenz Tate
#96. I just write characters, and somehow they happen to be a boy and a girl. When the story is put together, and their characters interwoven, they do end up together somehow.
Imtiaz Ali
#97. The most exciting part of writing a novel is when the characters take control of the story
Brandt Legg
#98. If I get blocked, it is generally because I don't know enough about some aspect of the story or the characters. The answer for this is generally more research, or making more background notes, so the place and person can be more fully realized inside my own mind.
Sarah Zettel
#99. The life story of the five main characters and the secondary characters around them allows Jonathan Franzen to present the full impetus and extent of the world picture of the West at the end of the 20th century.
Batya Gur
#100. We must remember that there's more than one story and plot in every novel. There are at least as many stories as there are main characters, and each of these stories has to have multiple plots to keep it going - blood and bone, nerve and tissue, forgotten longing and unknown events.
Walter Mosley
