Speak Characters Quotes

#1. 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

#2. In making Achilles and Patroclus lovers, I wasn't trying to speak for all gay men, just as when I write straight characters, I don't claim to speak for all straight people. My job as an author is to give voice to these very particular characters - these two men, in this time, and in this place

Madeline Miller

#3. People always love and respect characters who speak the truth, even if the truth hurts.

David Duchovny

#4. I love some films with very silent characters, people who don't speak, but I wouldn't be able to do that.

Arnaud Desplechin

#5. When I go and speak now at all sorts of conferences, later in the night there's always a better Maxie Walker than me. Billy Birmingham's legendary for basically being able to verbally kneecap any of a number of Australia's characters, particularly in the commentary box.

Max Walker

#6. If there weren't so many interesting conversations taking place inside my head, I might venture to speak out loud.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#7. They [my characters]speak to me all the time! In fact some of them never shut up!

Michael Scott

#8. Just when I think I have nothing to say, the characters start to speak. Writing is funny like that.

J.D. Barker

#9. Of my English friends, I should find language too poor to speak the just praise and the excellence which shines in their characters and lives.

Dorothea Dix

#10. If you think of the people who are funny in your life, you'll note it's not because they tell jokes, it's because of their character. If you develop characters, then you'll know them, and you'll know how they'll speak. The comedy will come out of the character.

Anne Beatts

#11. I'm not one of those authors who claims to hear voices in my head or 'let the characters speak through me,' whatever that might mean.

Robin Wasserman

#12. My characters have a mind of their own. I'm just the vessel through which they speak.

Ginny Lynn Peebles

#13. I want to continually play characters that speak to me, but also are different than what I've just done.

Santino Fontana

#14. It's your job to come up with compelling characters who speak to an individual authenticity. If I'm not interested in the characters, I can't go on. I have to be fascinated by them.

Nic Pizzolatto

#15. Drawing conclusions is up to the jury, that is, the readers. My only job is to be talented, that is, to know how to distinguish important testimony from unimportant, to place my characters in the proper light and speak their language.

Janet Malcolm

#16. In fiction, I tend to write fairly realistic dialogue-not always, and it tends to vary
from book to book. But in many books, there is a colloquialism of address. The characters will speak in a quite idiosyncratic way sometimes.

Don DeLillo

#17. Playing characters that speak a very violent language was my livelihood.

Greg Bryk

#18. I do not speak through my characters; it's not a ventriloquist act.

Aaron Sorkin

#19. When I started formulating the first Frank comic, I knew I wanted it to be something that was beyond time and specific place. I felt that having the characters speak would tie it to 20th-century America, because that would be the idiom of the language they would use, the language I use.

Jim Woodring

#20. I've learned to let my characters speak and act the way they want to! I've tried to interfere but they just get angry at me and throw big rocks.

Shandy L. Kurth

#21. I'm sort of a reverse Method actor. In my personal life, I become my characters. After 'One Tree Hill', I started dressing in Converse and ripped jeans and hoodies. On 'Awkward', it manifests in how I speak.

Ashley Rickards

#22. 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

#23. Matt Weiner is very perceptive; there's something about the rhythms and the way people speak that is very authentic to the actor. But there are qualities that are dissimilar. The characters on 'Mad Men' are struggling with pretty profound unhappiness, but I can tell you this is a happy bunch.

Aaron Staton

#24. 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

#25. The bad novelist constructs his characters; he directs them and makes them speak. The true novelist listens to them and watches them act; he hears their voices even before he knows them.

Andre Gide

#26. The parallels between a stage and a book are compelling. You, like all authors, create 'characters' in a 'setting' who speak 'dialogue' encased in 'scenes.' Most importantly, you - like the playwright - have an 'audience.'

Nancy Kress

#27. Good fantasy fiction: ... explores real human conditions through fantastic metaphors which universalize the characters' individual experiences to speak personally to us all.

Laura Resnick

#28. The characters in my books all resemble each other. They live, with minor variations, the same moments, the same perils, and when I speak of them, my language, which is inspired by them, repeats the same poems in the same tone.

Jean Genet

#29. Characters on stage, like people in what we refer to as "real life," do not speak to reveal themselves. They do not speak to conceal themselves. They speak to get whatever it is that they want. It is the only reason they speak.

David Mamet

#30. Your characters get angry at you if you speak about them and stop you from giving birth to them on the page in revenge. Real writers sit down and write. Wannabe writers sit around and talk.

Joe Eszterhas

#31. As an actor I'm always interested in dialogue, the way the characters speak to each other. I also enjoy a bit of humor, especially when it's unexpected.

Michael Boatman

#32. I look for characters that speak to something in me.

Dorian Missick

#33. As for dream roles, they usually just speak to you. I just crave complex characters.

Kirsten Prout

#34. Whether I'm writing a novel about a guy mourning the death of his father or whether I'm writing a show about people killing each other, you want to hear characters speak and be funny and witty.

Jonathan Tropper

#35. In dreams we are true poets; we create the persons of the drama; we give them appropriate figures faces, costumes; they are perfect in their organs, attitudes, manners; moreover they speak after their own characters, not ours; and we listen with surprise to what they say.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#36. Puppet camp truly redefined my preconceptions of puppetry ... I'll never forget learning that before a puppet can speak ... he has to inhale. It's those details that make the characters truly come to life.

Rob McClure

#37. I play a lot of characters where I don't even speak in my own voice. I learned about focus and I learned to trust that things can work when they're not heightened and that it's interesting when things are pared down.

Jenny Slate

#38. IF YOU PRETEND THE CHARACTERS CANT SPEAK, AND WRITE A SILENT MOVIE, YOU WILL BE WRITING GREAT DRAMA.

David Mamet

#39. 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

#40. Even respectable characters speak of a monarchical form of government without horror.

George Washington