Quotes on Characters

I declare I would rather be a kitten and cry, 'Mew!' than live as I see many of my female acquaintances do, tearing each other's characters to pieces, and wearing out their lives in vanity and vexation of spirit.

One of the ways my first novel failed was that I was too in love with my characters.

What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That's what their substance is.

I'm not a teacher; I'm not a historian. I'm trying to create a world for my characters.

My dad taught me to never be pigeonholed; to really allow yourself to reinvent characters as they reinvent you; to be bold and to be willing to play seemingly unlikeable people.

It can certainly happen that characters in more sophisticated stories can 'take over' as they develop and change the author's original ideas. Well, it certainly happens to me at times.

We figured the audience would want good stories, great art, wonderful characters, people you could fall in love with that we would immediately put through hell.

I like ambiguity because you may be the villain in someone else's story and the hero in your own, and I think very often, African-American characters are either one thing or the other. You shouldn't have to be perfectly good or perfectly bad. You don't even have to be magical.

It's hard in America as a writer of color, an actor of color, not to get caught up in race and culture. But you're also supposed to be able to write characters and scenes in a way where it's just a matter of fact, a component.

For a while, I was feeling like I was always playing characters that weren't specifically Korean or specifically Asian, even - that they were characters who were originally written white, and then they would cast me. And I used to consider that a badge of honor because that meant I had avoided stereotypes.

Queer black characters have been the sidekick for long enough. It's time for us to finally take the lead.

So many women characters are extensions of male fantasy.

Most of the female characters I admire come from science fiction and fantasy, maybe because there's more permission to shake up gender roles in genre.

It's important for people of colour to have the opportunities to play characters that are as nuanced - as three-dimensional, as human - as the characters who we traditionally see getting to play the protagonist. The good guys and the bad guys. The reason that is important is because it's a better reflection of the reality of the world we live in.

Wai Lin is the first Bond Girl who is on a par with Bond, someone who can match up with him mentally and physically. From the moment our characters see each other, there is a wariness and a recognition that this person is not who she or he seems to be.

My people are still poor. They're still working class. All of the characters that I write about are inspired by the community that I'm from.

If I'm honest about the people that I love, then I need my characters to live through the same things that the people I love and care about are living with and struggling with.

Dialogue is what a character's willing to share and reveal to another character, and the 90% they aren't willing to share is what I do for a living.

Sometimes female characters start out as the wife or girlfriend, but then I realize, 'No, she's the book,' and she becomes a main character. I surrender the book to her.

Our life is a book that writes itself and whose principal themes sometimes escape us. We are like characters in a novel who do not always understand what the author wants of them.

A typical TV show is always about protecting the franchise - it's all about stretching it out as long as you can take it. And it's about taking the characters in any given hour as far as you can take them, but then resetting them more or less back to zero so at the beginning of the next week, so they're still the character you know and love.