Quotes on Characters

I love it when novels contain a broad cast of characters, including queer ones.

After writing a novel, what is there to say? If a novelist could say it in a maxim, they wouldn't need 120,000 words, several years and sundry characters, plots and subplots, and so on. I'd much rather listen always.

There were so few examples of Asian or Asian-American lead characters on American TV or even in the movies. And the ones that have existed for so long were either stereotypical or offensive in some way, or just not reflective of the lives of people in the community.

I am a firm believer that a good plot makes for a fun enough read, but it's not what binds us. If we don't care about the characters, we won't care - not in a lasting way - about what's happening to them.

Performing comedy in San Francisco to begin with is pretty wild. You've got to - you've got the human game preserve to play off of. And it's a lot of great characters everywhere. You work off that, and then you play the rooms, and eventually you get to a point where you're playing a club that is a comedy club, with other comics.

I find that the only way to make my characters really interesting to children is to exaggerate all their good or bad qualities, and so if a person is nasty or bad or cruel, you make them very nasty, very bad, very cruel. If they are ugly, you make them extremely ugly. That, I think, is fun and makes an impact.

If you write fiction, you have to love your characters. It's like your family. You don't have to like them, but you have to love them.

Readers embrace all kinds of characters as long as they are written with emotional truth.

The deal is such that when I begin writing something, I open a door, and those characters come in, and then they won't leave, and so I live with them every day, all day. They are there with me when I'm driving my kids to school, when I'm standing in line at the grocery store.

I'm coming from the notion that acting is an art. It is not a business. It is about building characters, not about selling personalities.

I would say as a journalist, I would envision travelling to other countries that have had to reckon with their past and see how they've done it: what worked, what didn't work, finding characters that would tell the story of how that process was done.

Every one of his characters has their own idea, their own thing they want to express. Dostoevsky just lets them do it.

Regardless of theology or however you see life or relate to worshiping God, as an artist, my job is to tell the truth and then try to connect with these characters and people as honestly and deeply as possible.

My characters live inside my head for a long time before I actually start a book about them. Then, they become so real to me I talk about them at the dinner table as if they are real. Some people consider this weird. But my family understands.

I try to represent specific experiences of specific characters, and that's all I want to try to do. I don't ever try to think about representing a culture, because its impossible, and someone will fault you. And it just doesn't interest me.

That larger story in 'Salvage the Bones' is just about survival, and I think that, in the end, there are things about this novel and about these characters' experiences that make their stories universal stories.

On the stage, the characters express themselves more through words than images. So the arguments of the characters and the tension between characters - words have to be used to express that, and I love that about theater.

To tell you the truth, while I do enjoy the grand-scale elements, it's the personal scenes, the character moments that I really find satisfying. That's where I get to delve into the characters' minds and hearts. That's where they become living, breathing beings to me.

I guess it's flattering that everyone believed I was those characters, but it also is dehumanizing.

When you play characters, you shouldn't just be putting on their characteristics - you should be finding it inside yourself.

When I realised that what I do really well is play women who are tough and vulnerable, it was a moment of clarity. Many female characters either have one trait or the other, but I play both. I don't need to play characters who are like me. I can just do that with my life.