Characters Quotes

It is the sweat of the servants that make their squire look smart.

Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blending with the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if it were yourself palpitating beneath their costumes.

All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes -- characters even -- caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.

Dresses won't worn out in the wardrobe, but that is not what dresses are designed for.

There are two characters in me: a doodler and a tuner. And the only thing that makes me go crazy is when they both fight for their turn.

The best part of the fiction in many novels is the notice that the characters are imaginary.

There’s no such thing as a good or bad person: there are just people who have each been or seem to have been good or bad to you, someone, or some people, thus far.

I never draw blood on a first date.

[W]hen I put Jorge in the library I did not yet know he was the murderer. He acted on his own, so to speak. And it must not be thought that this is an 'idealistic' position, as if I were saying that the characters have an autonomous life and the author, in a kind of trance, makes them behave as they themselves direct him. That kind of nonsense belongs in term papers. The fact is that the characters are obliged to act according to the laws of the world in which they live. In other words, the narrator is the prisoner of his own premises.

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

In a democracy government is the God.

But, how do you know if an ending is truly good for the characters unless you've traveled with them through every page?

Addicts don't like when you tell them they are all the same. Of course not. Who would? But to me, addicts are like actresses, who all audition for the same role in a horror movie. It doesn't matter how they got to the audition. It doesn't matter how or where they grew up, once they get to the audition, all the actresses act in the same way and read the same lines. They all become the same character.

Sow a thought, and you reap an act;Sow an act, and you reap a habit;Sow a habit, and you reap a character;Sow a character, and you reap a destiny.

When you were making excuses someone else was making enterprise.

Dresses don't look beautiful on hangers.

The world is administered by rich but it is constructed by poor.

Listen to what you have written. A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don't yet understand the characters well enough to write in their vo

Father has a strengthening character like the sun and mother has a soothing temper like the moon.

In general, poor is polite and rich is rude.

Power does not pardon, power punishes.

The magic and the danger of fiction is this: it allows us to see through other eyes. It takes us to places we have never been, allows us to care about, worry about, laugh with, and cry for people who do not, outside of the story, exist. There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.

He who sacrifices his respect for love basically burns his body to obtain the light.

I turned to the window. A single raindrop fell against it, and seeing my reflection in the glass, I suddenly knew why Finn’s eyes were familiar.They were exactly like mine.

In modern times couples are more concerned about loyalty than love.

When writing fiction, you learn to only put things and characters in, that are going to progress your story. There is something to be learned about that approach in real life

Like the 'good' characters in literature, the sane don't have any memorable lines.

Stories start in all sorts of places. Where they begin often tells the reader of what to expect as they progress. Castles often lead to dragons, country estates to deeds of deepest love (or of hate), and ambiguously presented settings usually lead to equally as ambiguous characters and plot, leaving a reader with an ambiguous feeling of disappointment. That's one of the worst kinds.

Respect cannot be inherited, respect is the result of right actions.

As an artist she finds Dick's work hopelessly naive, yet she is a lover of certain kinds of bad art, art which offers a transparency into the hopes and desires of the person who made it. Bad art makes the viewer much more active. (Years later Chris would realise that her fondness for bad art is exactly like Jane Eyre's attraction to Rochester, a mean horse-faced junkie: bad characters invite invention.

Hundreds of thousands of people live in my library. Some are real, others are fictional. The real ones are the so-called imaginary characters in works of literature, the fictional ones are their authors. We know everything about the former, or at least as much as we are meant to know, everything that is written about a given character in a novel, a story or a poem in which she or he figures...The rest doesn't matter. Nothing is hidden from us. For us, a novel's characters are real. (p. 80

You can take the Indian out of the family, but you cannot take the family out of the Indian.

Be a worthy worker and work will come.

Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.

Any girl with a grin never looks grim.

You can never know enough about your characters

By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that person knows himself or herself. You're sort of a predator, an invader of people.

I don't know where people got the idea that characters in books are supposed to be likable. Books are not in the business of creating merely likeable characters with whom you can have some simple identification with. Books are in the business of creating great stories that make you're brain go ahhbdgbdmerhbergurhbudgerbudbaaarr.

We live in a society where mutual respect and appreciation should be considered one of the pillars of modern life.

Some of us can live without a society but not without a family.

Real people are made out of a whole lot of things—flesh, bone, blood, nerves, stuff like that. Literary people are made out of words.

I write flawed characters. Ones that do not always make the best decisions and are driven by ambition or lust. They are not black or white, they are in the large space that exists between.

Making a product is just an activity, making a profit on a product is the achievement.

Is the writer cruel that makes his characters suffer only to bring them to triumph or tragedy in the end?

A novel must show how the world truly is, how characters genuinely think, how events actually occur. A novel should somehow reveal the true source of our actions.

If you can't impress them with your argument, impress them with your actions.

In daily life we never understand each other, neither complete clairvoyance nor complete confessional exists. We know each other approximately, by external signs, and these serve well enough as a basis for society and even for intimacy. But people in a novel can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist wishes; their inner as well as their outer life can be exposed. And this is why they often seem more definite than characters in history, or even our own friends; we have been told all about them that can be told; even if they are imperfect or unreal they do not contain any secrets, whereas our friends do and must, mutual secrecy being one of the conditions of life upon this globe.

The wrong man is not always wrong because of his wrong actions, often he is wrong because of no actions.

Cowards say it can't be done, critics say it shouldn't have been done, creator say well done.

Reading is a full contact sport; we crash up against the wave of words with all of our intellectual, imaginative, and emotional resources. What results can sometimes be as much our creation as the novelist's or playwright's.

If she says goodbye, someone else will say hi.

What's real and what's not? People we meet in books--Holden Caulfield, Captain Ahab, Huckleberry Finn, Harry Potter, Bilbo and Gandalf and Frodo-- can become more memorable, and more important to us than people with birth certificates and drivers' licenses. Characters spawned in an author's imagination find a home inside us. They make our lives richer. They become our best friends. They never disappoint. And they never die.

Civilians enjoy their time because soldiers sacrifice their time.

A novelist's characters must be with him as he lies down to sleep, and as he wakes from his dreams. He must learn to hate them and to love them.

My problem as a writer is that—whenever I meet someone for the first time—I immediately invent for them a personality and background that are invariably more interesting than the ones they possess. And confirming this character to be uninteresting after a few minutes of conversation, I decide that they are unnecessary to my story and begin devising ways to kill them off.

And who would dare write their own death into the script so that the rest of the characters in the tale might live? God of course.

Writing is hard work, and if anything's true about the process, it's that fact that a good story is hard to find and even trickier to get on paper. What's less romantic than staring alone at a blank screen? And edgy? I've changed the cat little because I didn't know what my characters were going to say next.

Films, truths!Question 1How you get sad in movie?Mainly the music makes you sad if something happens and there isn't music... there isn't and sadness.Question 2How do you get in best level scared?- It's need silence... footsteps... silence... silence and then from nowhere something to came out.Question 3How do you make people to love the characters?- People like all kinds of characters, but to love them they should hear not what they want but what they won't expect, a character based on their problems and experience...

Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of."[From the preface.]

I wish stories were kinder to their characters," Maddie said. "But I guess trouble is more interesting to read about.