Writing And Character Quotes

#1. For the last 20 years of my life, I've had the mantra to do amazing parts with amazing people in amazing projects, so I'm attracted to good story, writing and character and good people. That's what I'm always searching for and I don't think that's ever going to change.

John Hawkes

#2. But [Patrick's] character is partly based on a boy named Mark who lived across the street from me when I was growing up ... I liked hanging out with him and was sad when he moved away after only a year in the neighborhood. I guess writing about Patrick is a way for me to spend more time with Mark.

Linda Sue Park

#3. I think that the joy of writing a novel is the self-exploratio n that emerges and also that wonderful feeling of playing God with the characters. When I sit down at my writing desk, time seems to vanish ... I think the most important thing for a writer is to be locked in a study.

Erica Jong

#4. For me, it's important that I experience and feel what the characters are feeling. So I put myself in those moments, in their thoughts, and let it happen naturally. I write what I feel.

Chevy Stevens

#5. 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

#6. I think that fiction writers can write about anyone. If you are writing a character, and the only thing they are to you is their otherness, then you haven't written a character.

Hanya Yanagihara

#7. I write from this tight third-person viewpoint, where each chapter is seen through the eyes of one individual character. When I'm writing that character, I become that character and identify with that character.

George R R Martin

#8. I grew up writing thank-you notes. Real, honest-to-goodness, pen-and-ink, stamped and posted letters. More than simple habit, it's about what the commitment to expressing your thoughts and feelings in writing says about the character of the writer. About the joy such notes bring to the reader.

Taylor Mali

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. Delicious days ahead for solitude and writing and, oh yes, the holiday meal with family. Live with my characters until term starts in 2012!

Stella Atrium

#12. Short of a small range of physical acts-a fight, murder, lovemaking-dialogue is the most vigorous and visible inter-action of which characters in a novel are capable. Speech is what characters do to each other.

Elizabeth Bowen

#13. People should know better than to be an ass in front of writers. We immortalize things. Lots of things. And we take liberties with character descriptions.

Michelle M. Pillow

#14. I start with an image, then I go from the image toward exploring the situation. Then I write a scene, and from the scene I find the character, from the character I find the larger plot. It's like deductive reasoning - I start with the smaller stuff and work backward.

Dan Chaon

#15. One exercise I always do when I'm getting to know a character is ask her to tell me her secrets. Sit down with a pen and paper, and start with, 'I never told anybody ... ' and go from there, writing in the voice of your character.

Jennifer McMahon

#16. When you've got good writing, you can kind of give up all the research, in a way, and start just following the emotional integrity of the journey of your character.

Linus Roache

#17. Oftentimes, when people don't respond to text messages or emails, I just start writing long, long in-depth essays and diatribes where characters start to appear and narrative threads begin.

Lucas Neff

#18. I really like Shakespeare a lot. The characters that he writes for females, I think, are really great and a lot more compelling than what modern writers write, which is weird because they didn't have actresses then.

Julia Stiles

#19. On Writing About Nora Hawks
I write about a female character to try, in vain, to understand two things: the purpose of life, and women.

Dennis R. Miller

#20. Basically you come up with the fictional idea and you start writing that story, but then in order to write it and to make it seem real, you sometimes put your own memories in. Even if it's a character that's very different from you.

Jeffrey Eugenides

#21. If the character is really well-rounded, and it's a really strong character, and if the writing is just fantastic, that's the thing that will hook me in, certainly.

Amanda Abbington

#22. The most fun part for an actor is the writing and the story and the character. That's very fulfilling.

Dominique McElligott

#23. Writing a novel, in an unplanned and unpredictable way, makes you engaged; it takes you into yourself, and it becomes something between you and the character for a moment, and then you move back into the structure of the book. I love those moments, because they are completely unbidden.

David Bezmozgis

#24. Realize that by hurting your own characters, you are not a sadist. You are not deliberately hurting your loved ones merely to watch them suffer. You're giving a gift. You're helping them grow and develop. Your characters take on deeper meaning to become more alive on your pages. They'll become real.

James Chartrand

#25. Yeah, and the language the "we" has, and the character the "we" has. Because that was the part of the book that I didn't plan out, but the part that I was most curious about as I was writing. You know what you're doing, but you're sometimes still sort of curious as you're writing it.

Chang-rae Lee

#26. Good storytelling lets the audience relive events in the present so they can understand the forces, choices, and emotions that led the character to do what he did.

John Truby

#27. 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

#28. For me, if the writing and - by extension - the subject matter and the characters are all good, it doesn't matter if it's film or TV. Each medium has great things going for it.

Adam Croasdell

#29. Nietzsche himself was a great moralist; his writings abound with value judgments about individuals, character types, modes of thinking, and national traits. It is as if he develops immoralist psychology in order to tame his own nature, to keep his own greatest vice in check.

John Carroll

#30. I really was a fan of his and always have been - his writing especially, you know? I think people a lot of times overlook that part, because he kind of got into that party character so heavy.

Alan Jackson

#31. Allowing alternative narrative modes in popular entertainment may seem obvious, yet when you turn a pilot into the people upstairs and the main character isn't after what she wants by the top of page two, you get treated as if you've failed at writing.

Andrea Seigel

#32. What I enjoy most are those times when I get an idea and it just flows - the words coming so fast that I'm scribbling to keep up with my characters. I don't have any writing must-haves; this is a good thing, since I've done a lot of my writing in random places like the playground or the subway.

Leah Cypess

#33. Pace, like everything else in writing, involves a trade-off. If you're not offering the reader a lot of action to keep her interested, you must offer something else in its stead. Slow pace is ideal for complex character development, detailed description, and nuances of style.

Nancy Kress

#34. I was always fascinated by the fact that you could take paper and ink and create worlds, images, characters. It seemed like magic.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#35. I'd say that any character or setting can be given a bit of an otherworldly sheen and be the better for it. The one thing I insist on with my own writing is that I won't let magic solve my characters' real world problems. The solutions have to come from the characters themselves.

Charles De Lint

#36. Life is a book that someone else is reading - and you, a key character - hence the need for continual conflict and resolution. We can't have any boring books.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#37. In nearly everything I write, I am like a ventriloquist, throwing my voice into my characters, animating them by the slightest twitch as I register my anxieties and alarms. This is true even in my comedies.

Norman Lock

#38. A risk for a poet-novelist is imbalance: The poems can flatten into prose or lose their intensity of focus; the novels can stall amid lofty writing or literary preciousness and ignore the engine of plot and character.

Floyd Skloot

#39. As you write your novel, you gradually start thinking like some of your characters in it. And at times the writer may lose himself completely in some character.

Avijeet Das

#40. I write poems about relationships, love relationships, and I'm not able to do that all the time. I could go two years without writing poems, and then write a dozen. Having a novel to work on, with the intricate puzzle of character and plot to work out, is satisfying for the time there is no poetry.

May Sarton

#41. For 350 years we have been taught that reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man and writing an exact man. Football's place is to add a patina of character, a deference to the rules and a respect for authority.

Red Smith

#42. Writing is really freeing because it's the only part of the process where it's just you and the characters and you are by yourself in a room and you can just hash it out. There are no limitations.

Dee Rees

#43. I find it an easy way into writing pieces is to think what the character's voice is like, and start from there.

Armando Iannucci

#44. Every good story needs a good, bad and lost soul. A people to fight for, an item to turn the tide of battle, an enigmatic character, a motivator/mentor, and an unlikely reluctant hero.

Josh Rose

#45. Writing is a solitary existence. Making a movie is controlled chaos - thousands of moving parts and people. Every decision is a compromise. If you're writing and you don't like how your character looks or talks, you just fix it. But in a movie, if there's something you don't like, that's tough.

Dan Brown

#46. I don't really have a drive toward being a director at all. Not that I wouldn't rule it out, but I just don't think my instincts lie necessarily in a very visual way. But I am very interested in storytelling, narrative and character development, so writing is something that I absolutely want to do.

Rose McIver

#47. When I was writing my first draft, and feeling grandiose, I e-mailed an artist/clothing designer I know and suggested we collaborate on a fashion line inspired by the outfits my characters wore. I regret that we never did that.

Heidi Julavits

#48. Things that only a writer would understand - you're writing a character - you tell that character who she or he is and they stop you and make it clear, they are the ones telling their story. You just have to let them tell it.

Lisa Marbly-Warir

#49. My own feeling is that the only possible reason for engaging in the hard labor of writing a novel, is that one is bothered by something one needs to understand, and can come to understand only through the characters in the imagined situation.

May Sarton

#50. If you want to do your version, go off and write it. You bring your knowledge to it, and you can use that to shape it and color it, but it's someone else's version of that character. You're not actually playing the real person.

Jared Harris

#51. A writer's knowledge of himself, realistic and unromantic, is like a store of energy on which he must draw for a lifetime: one volt of it properly directed will bring a character to life.

Graham Greene

#52. I never actually do rehearsals. That's one of the reasons that I write those bios and if I can meet with the actors I'll meet them or talk to them on the phone. What I want is for them to come on set knowing their lines and knowing who the character is.

John Sayles

#53. Whether I'm writing the script, or someone else writes the initial draft, I'm always an actor's director first. I always try to listen to them a lot and try to put their voices into their character.

Dito Montiel

#54. I write characters that are based on elements of people I know and experiences I've really had.

Aziz Ansari

#55. I don't see one as bring better or more literate than the other and there's a real buzz to not only writing about a character I love like Superman, but also writing something that kids can enjoy.

Mark Millar

#56. I regard writing not as an investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed.

Evelyn Waugh

#57. When I write fiction, I create characters whose views are not my own, and I allow them to be eloquent in defense of their, not my, views.

Orson Scott Card

#58. So research is a terribly imperfect science, and you learn an awful lot more after you've published a book, because people keep writing to you and saying, 'Oh, gosh, I was related to such and such a character and I have a letter in my possession.'

Simon Winchester

#59. Characters aren't a fling. They aren't a one-night stand. Getting to know them takes time and hard work. It takes excessive free writes and multiple experiments.

Margaret Foley

#60. My characters will happily march off a cliff if it is in them to do so, but may the gods help me if I write that the character is an alcoholic when they are not. They will fight me at every turn and it is their domain. A writer cannot win against a stubborn character.

Thomm Quackenbush

#61. The greatest compliment a writer can be given is that a story and character hold a reader spellbound. I'm caught up in the story writing and I miss a good deal of sleep thinking about it and working out the plot points.

Iris Johansen

#62. I don't write the same book over and over - I think if I did that, I would stop writing. I couldn't write a series with the same character, and I couldn't write a romance novel over and over again that takes place at a different beach every year. That's not who I am.

Jodi Picoult

#63. What I do in the writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself. It is the act of a writer's imagination that I set the most high.

Eudora Welty

#64. There's a point I can get to where I start writing character and then through the dialogue, after all of this preparation, the thing starts to feel like it's a character developing through the dialogue. A lot of character traits do come from writing dialogue, but I have to be ready to do it.

Charlie Kaufman

#65. I write what I can. I think being able to write like Michael Connelly and have a character that goes from novel to novel, or to dramatize history like Vidal or Ellroy, or have an explosively inventive mind like Bulgakov, would be an incredible thing. I don't have that. I only have what I have.

Henry Rollins

#66. The things that have always drawn me to the craft of writing is character, it's story, it's something that becomes like a pebble in my shoe, a voice that I just can't get rid of, and I've got to see it through.

Khaled Hosseini

#67. The process of writing a novel begins with a pang, a moment of recognition, and a situation, a character, or something you read in a paper, that seems to go off, like a solar flare inside your head.

Martin Amis

#68. I think there's a false division people sometimes make in describing literary novels, where there are people who write systems novels, or novels of ideas, and there are people who write about emotional things in which the movement is character driven. But no good novels are divisible in that way.

Dana Spiotta

#69. Even in dialogue, your own style rules your selection. Do not give yourself a blank check of this kind: 'I'll merely reproduce what I think a character like so-and-so would say.' You have to reproduce it in the way your literary premises dictate.

Ayn Rand

#70. Honestly, when you're writing you try to stay on the story, on the character's mind, trying to throw stuff at them. There is danger, and the scares have to kick in the right places with the drama. And you try not to do too much to try to create those moments. Those moments create themselves.

Fede Alvarez

#71. I write stories about conspiracies and paranoid characters while I am, in fact, a very skeptical person.

Umberto Eco

#72. While every chapter should have goals to further the plot and delve our readers deeper into our world, there must be one goal above all else: Emotional Impact.

A.J. Flowers

#73. It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.

William Faulkner

#74. By mastering character and plot, you give your book a fighting chance and without
character and plot, no book can survive.

Craig Hart

#75. If you get the landscape right, the characters will step out of it, and they'll be in the right place.

Annie Proulx

#76. I enjoy the kind of characters that allow you to write the dark stuff. I love Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky, and when I'm writing for Dracula or Jekyll & Hyde, I get a chance to use that vocabulary.

Frank Wildhorn

#77. 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

#78. When I think about [characters], I like to think of them in their relationships to each other. In the same way, I think that's how humans are ultimately defined. We are our relationships to one another. And a lot of what's interesting about us happens in the context of other people.

John Green

#79. I'm never lonely when I'm writing, because you live with the characters that are so alive in your mind. And you really see them and know them and get to be friends with them.

Julie Andrews

#80. I'm usually a panster and throw ideas down on computer the second they hit my brain. I even had to get off the treadmill to write down my ideas. It's a great place to 'zone out' and think about my plots and characters.

Franny Armstrong

#81. The only black people you found were occasional characters or characters who were so feeble-witted that they couldn't manage anything, anyway. I wrote myself in, since I'm me and I'm here and I'm writing.

Octavia Butler

#82. I don't write for an audience. I write for myself. And if I imagine an audience at all, it's the characters, but I know that I would keep writing even if no one ever published me again, even if no one ever read me again.

Ursula Hegi

#83. There are so many burning issues to be dealt with that it's completely understandable and natural that a character is struggling with these issues themselves. In that struggle, you inform the audience. The thing about this writing is that it's very easy to learn. Good writing always is.

Colm Meaney

#84. It doesn't matter if your lead character is good or bad. He just has to be interesting, and he has to be good at what he does.

David Chase

#85. I have always been drawn to characters, and this was true for my feature-writing career as well, where there is a tension between rule-breaking and rule-following.

Matt Nix

#86. Despite my vast interest in other universes and new ideas and space, travel and time travel, which by the way I think is impossible, the basic thing is human character, which is the main thing of most writers.

Philip Jose Farmer

#87. Writing is work, but it's also a compulsion, and once you get your characters on paper, you can't abandon them. You have to respond to them.

Rosamunde Pilcher

#88. TV is a different animal these days. You can bring together really smart writing and directing, in-depth character development and really meaty political and emotional stories.

Connie Nielsen

#89. I feel like having details from their day and having a plot and action and things to do is much more revealing than having a character sitting and thinking to themselves. When I'm writing, I want people to actually have a goal, something that's dragging them forward.

Kaui Hart Hemmings

#90. One never knows enough about characters in real life to put them into novels. One gets started and then, suddenly, one can not remember what toothpaste they use; what are their views on interior decoration, and one is stuck utterly. No, major characters emerge; minor ones may be photographed.

Graham Greene

#91. There's surprisingly little difference between writing from a male angle and from a female angle, but I feel more restricted in my language when I'm writing as a male character because males tend to sound less emotionally expressive than females.

Anne Tyler

#92. There's so much I can't read because I get so exasperated. Someone starts describing the character boarding the plane and pulling the seat back. And I just want to say, Babe, I have been downtown. I have been up in a plane. Give me some credit.

Amy Hempel

#93. I've always loved writing emotionally rich, character-driven novels that explore the way people fall in love and deal with life's triumphs and tragedies. I enjoy writing the contemporary and historical books equally, though perhaps 'enjoy' is the wrong word.

Susan Wiggs

#94. I wrote this script in 2003, when I was a humble college student, sitting in my boxers and writing in my dorm room. And I came up with the idea of writing an action-based 'Snow White,' with this kind of Huntsman character as kind of a way in. So, that's something I'm sort of proud of.

Evan Daugherty

#95. But if you don't understand that story is character and not just idea, you will not be able to breathe life into even the most intriguing flash of inspiration.

Elizabeth George

#96. It's when you feel worse, that's when your character comes out and the last thing you want to do is quit.

Paul T. Scheuring

#97. After writing for TV for a while, I got sort of fed up with all of the cancellations and the volatility in that industry. Also, you're always writing for someone else's character and story, and I really wanted to develop my own.

Kristin Gore

#98. I love people like Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, people who create and write their own stuff - especially when there's just not enough cool, interesting characters out there.

Debby Ryan

#99. There's no way the writing staff of 'Game of Thrones' haven't read 'The Art of War.' There's definitely an influence on 'Game of Thrones' from this book in both a general way and on the character of Lord Baelish and his strategies.

Aidan Gillen

#100. When you write a character and their dialogue, you can't help imagining how you would be acting if you were them. You kind of have to relate to all of them. It's the most personal thing I've ever done.

Tom Ford