Quotes on Characters

It's really, always, the story and the characters that come first, and the other things are kind of dealt with in time or, in fact, driven by the story.

When I was writing my first novel, 'Where the Line Bleeds,' which had young black men as its main characters, I was very invested in telling the story and also very worried about the effects the story would have.

Being a black lesbian myself, I roll my eyes a little bit when I see black lesbian characters on shows where it's purely there for decoration. You can just hear it in the writers room... 'What if we make her a lesbian?'

It's weird because I see black gay characters on television all the time, but do I relate to them? Not always, because they're set pieces.

It's hard to penetrate characters who are very cut off and lack empathy and to do it with sympathy. It's so easy to make a damaged character repugnant.

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.

I think accurately presenting a trans character means not presenting them as perfect - I think there's been a pressure to do this with trans characters. They can have no flaws because they must represent the entire trans community.

All the writing elements are the same. You need to tell a good story... You've got good characters... People think there's some dramatic difference between writing 'Little Bear' and the 'Hunger Games,' and as a writer, for me, there isn't.

It's like these ideas, these characters, kind of bubble up inside me, and one day they're not there, and the next day they are there. They're alive, and they're whispering in my head and all that stuff, and I want to write about those things.

I don't have a clear biography of my own that I could recount in an interesting way. I'm made up of the characters that I pulled out of my head, that I invented.

If women were particular about men's characters, they would never get married at all.

I think, when I write, one of the things that I'm really attempting to do is I'm attempting to humanize my characters.

I think all those actors from that generation, like Bogart - they were wonderful actors. They didn't act. They just came on and they did it, and the characters were wonderful.

I don't do jokes. The characters are my jokes.

I'm an actor. Since I was a teenager, I have had to play different characters, negotiating the cultural expectations of a Pakistani family, Brit-Asian rudeboy culture, and a scholarship to private school. The fluidity of my own personal identity on any given day was further compounded by the changing labels assigned to Asians in general.

The stronger the participation of the female characters, the better the movie. They knew that in the old days, when women stars were equally as important as men.

This is the beauty of fiction. We may not like these characters, but we inhabit them.

It's true that none of my characters are admirable. But maybe I'm primarily a satirist, and a satirist needs to hold up what's not admirable.

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.

We're showing kids a world that is very scantily populated with women and female characters. They should see female characters taking up half the planet, which we do.

It interests me to imagine characters shifting from one situation and one location to another for whatever the circumstances may be.