Quotes on Characters

When I lock myself up to write, I cannot allow myself to think about the censor or the reviewer or anyone but my characters and their story!

What I remember when I started to write was how I couldn't wait to get up in the morning to get to my characters.

My characters hope for better lives.

I realised I had spent the majority of my adult life doing two characters - Maude from 1972-'79 and Dorothy from 1985-'92 - and I really didn't know what I wanted to do after 'Golden Girls.' I knew what I didn't want to do - any more sitcoms, or wait for the next great role that might never come.

I believe black characters in fiction are still revolutionary, given our long history of erasure.

When I'm writing from a character's viewpoint, in essence I become that character; I share their thoughts, I see the world through their eyes and try to feel everything they feel.

The characters I've played, especially Bret Maverick and Jim Rockford, almost never use a gun, and they always try to use their wits instead of their fists.

Meeting authors is kind of the death of the characters. That is always heartbreaking.

I like films that take their time a little bit more and don't show you all of their cards right away, characters that are conflicted and contradicting and seem one way at first and then suddenly turn out to be something else.

Storytelling is ultimately a creative act of pattern recognition. Through characters, plot and setting, a writer creates places where previously invisible truths become visible. Or the storyteller posits a series of dots that the reader can connect.

Hip-hop, which is my generation's blues, is important to the characters that I write about. They use hip-hop to understand the world through language.

With all the main characters that I write, it's always very important to me that they have good and bad aspects of their personality. It's important to me that they're complicated and that they're human.

Giving voice to marginalised characters is extremely important to me. I want to explore the pain of disenfranchisement, the social strata and boundaries we create and how to make them more permeable.

I like flawed characters, and I like seeing people who are supposed to be not villains but antagonists. There are elements to them, which are really annoying, but you kind of see where they came from. You see the things that caused those inadequacies.

Plots are artificial. Does your life have a plot? It has characters. There is a narrative. There's a lot of story, a lot of character. But plot? Eh, no.

Nobody ever asks me why my characters don't text each other. Besides, as soon as you put something 'electronic' in a book, it's already out of date by the time it's published: everything will have changed. Human emotion, on the other hand, will never change.

Having transgender characters leads to more visibility, which creates education. Education can hopefully lead to everyone treating our community with acceptance and love.

You don't often see a cross section of female characters interacting with each other at the top of a chain.

My goal is for 'Heavy Rain' to leave an imprint in you and change a little bit of who you are and how you see things. Maybe the key characters and key moments will leave a trace in you. If you don't have this ambition as a video-game creator, then maybe you should do something else, because this is what creation and art is about.

If you let the plot be determined by what you feel is in the character's mind at that point, it may not turn out to be a very good play, but at least it will be a play where people are behaving in a kind of truthful way.

First, I would find an object which I would think is suitable for my characters and stories, then write about it, and in the end, I ended up with a house full of thousands of objects.