Characters In Novels Quotes

I do believe that characters in novels belong to their writers and their readers pretty equally. I've learned a lot of things about the characters I write from people who read about them. Readers expand them in ways I don't think of and take them to places I can't go. ~ Ann Brashares

...when I die I'll meet my characters in heaven. And they won't be made at me . . ." Nick Cole

Probably the coolest quote from an author I have ever heard! ~ Nick Cole

Anaemia is an illness primarily affecting characters in novels. ~ Marchel Reich-Ranicki

Sometimes, I feel like I connect more deeply with the characters in novels than with people I meet in real life. Maybe because in novels you get to read their thoughts. In life, you never know what people are thinking. ~ Varian Krylov

I project myself so deeply into the characters in novels that I'm not thinking about my own life. ~ Paul Auster

The worst part of writing is meeting all these great new characters and having no one to talk about (the adventures you share with) them. ~ Claudia Bakker

Levin was almost of the same age as Oblonsky; their intimacy did not rest merely on champagne. Levin had been the friend and companion of his early youth. They were fond of one another in spite of the difference of their characters and tastes, as friends are fond of one another who have been together in early youth. But in spite of this, each of them - as is often the way with men who have selected careers of different kinds - though in discussion he would even justify the other's career, in his heart despised it. It seemed to each of them that the life he led himself was the only real life, and the life led by his friend was a mere phantasm. Oblonsky could not restrain a slight mocking smile at the sight of Levin. How often he had seen him come up to Moscow from the country where he was doing something, but what precisely Stepan Arkadyevitch could never quite make out, and indeed he took no interest in the matter. Levin arrived in Moscow always excited and in a hurry, rather ill at ease and irritated by his own want of ease, and for the most part with a perfectly new, unexpected view of things. Stepan Arkadyevitch laughed at this, and liked it. In the same way Levin in his heart despised the town mode of life of his friend, and his official duties, which he laughed at, and regarded as trifling. But the difference was that Oblonsky, as he was doing the same as every one did, laughed complacently and good-humoredly, while Levin laughed without complacency and sometimes angrily ~ Leo Tolstoy

I write in the most classical French because this form is necessary for my novels: to translate the murky, floating, unsettling atmosphere I wanted them to have, I had to discipline it into the clearest, most traditional language possible. ~ Patrick Modiano

I think some of my best theatre training has been in the Marine Corps. Not only meeting a bunch of characters, but growing up. You're in really adult situations at a young age, as far as being in charge of people. ~ Adam Driver

I've always been fascinated by the concept of reincarnation. I learned that many brilliant people were interested in reincarnation, including Carl Jung. I'm a big Jungian. So I began writing novels involving theories integrating past and present, even if the past element in the novel took place 500 or 1,000 years ago. ~ M.J. Rose

Colin Morgan gives a stunning performance in Parked; he plays Merlin in the BBC TV show and he says the two characters are like night and day. Watch him. He's got everything it takes to be top notch. ~ Colm Meaney

Even when I'm writing animation, I think of them as real people. I think of them as completely three-dimensional beings, even if it's a talking teapot. I don't think of them as one-dimensional drawn characters running around. Maybe that's why, to me, there's really no difference in writing the two - animation versus live action. ~ Linda Woolverton

The inexperienced reader wants the essentially familiar combined with superficial novelty. Each story must have a slightly new setting or twist or "gimmick," though the fundamental features of the characters and situations remain the same. He evaluates a story not by its truth but by its twists and turns and surprises, by its suspense or its love interest. He wants his stories to be mainly pleasant. Evil, danger, and misery may appear in them, but not in such a way that they need be taken really seriously or are felt to be oppressive or permanent. He wants reading that slips easily and smoothly through his mind, requiring little mental effort. Most of all, he wants something that helps sustain his fantasy life, providing ready-made daydreams in which he overcomes his limitations, thwarts his enemies, and wins success or fame or the girl. ~ Laurence Perrine

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. ~ Tom Stoppard

The story is the only thing that's important. Everything else will take care of itself. It's like what bowlers say. You hear writers talk about character or theme or mood or mode or tense or person. But bowlers say, if you make the spares, the strikes will take care of themselves. If you can tell a story, everything else becomes possible. But without story, nothing is possible, because nobody wants to hear about your sensitive characters if there's nothing happening in the story. And the same is true with mood. Story is the only thing that's important. ~ Stephen King

The god of unreflecting drunkenness advised me to take no reading matter at all, or if I absolutely insisted on reading matter, then a little stack of Rasputin would do; Apollo, on the other hand, in his shrewd, sensible way, tried to talk me out of this trip to France altogether, but when he saw that Oskar's mind was made up, insisted on proper baggage; very well, I would have to take the highly respectable yawn that Goethe had yawned so long ago, but for spite, and also because I knew that The Elective Affinities would never solve all my sexual problems, I also took Rasputin and his naked women, naked but for their black stockings. If Apollo strove for harmony and Dionysus for drunkenness and chaos, Oskar was a little demigod whose business it was to harmonize chaos and intoxicate reason. In addition to his mortality, he had one advantage over all the full divinities whose characters and careers had been established in the remote past: Oskar could read what he pleased whereas the gods censored themselves. ~ Gunter Grass

in fact, while I was sitting there, listening to all the voices painting the quiet living room, the situation reminded me, somewhat, of a movie I once saw; it was called Rashomon, and at the end of it, for some reason, I cried; I remember that I didn't want the movie to end, to resolve itself in any way at all; I wanted the movie just to keep going, to keep coming up with more versions of its story, to keep producing more characters so they could add their takes on the tale; so I was really upset when the film felt the need to come to a conclusion and the lights came up; I remember walking home holding my fist to my mouth, to keep my crying from lathering out; ~ Evan Dara

So much of movie acting is in the lighting. And in loving your characters. I try to know them, and with that intimacy comes love. And now, I love Voldemort. ~ Ralph Fiennes

In the past, it was only in science fiction novels that you could read about ordinary people being able to go to space ... But you laid the foundation for space tourism. ~ Nursultan Nazarbayev

It didn't matter that she didn't live here, that a relationship was out of the question. It was probably because a relationship wouldn't happen that he could let himself get this close. He wrapped his arms tighter around her as though this were all that existed in the world. Just the two of them, the mountain, the clean winter air. The taste of her tongue on his lips. ~ Rebecca Brooks

In novels, women run off with their lovers. In real life, women stay. ~ Kim Wright

For years, I took notes.
I pored over her work incessantly.
I quoted or mentioned Charlotte in several of my novels.
I tried to write this book so many times.
But how?
Should I be present?
Should I fictionalize her story?
What form should my obsession take?
I began, I tried, then I gave up.
I couldn't manage to string two sentences together.
At every point, I felt blocked.
Impossible to go on.
It was a physical sensation, an oppression.
I felt the need to move to the next line in order to breathe.

So, I realized that I had to write it like this. ~ David Foenkinos

I knew Chloe LOVED to read, but I was in the middle of a MAJOR life crisis! For once, couldn't she just try focusing on ME instead of her stupid book characters?! Then ~ Rachel Renee Russell

There is a strange impulse in many to protect Bible characters and to use them as inspiration ... as if sanctification happens as a result of emulation. ~ Tullian Tchividjian

The real protagonist of the story, however, is the magic ring, because it is the movements of the ring that determine those of the characters and because it is the ring that establishes the relationships between them. Around the magic object there forms a kind of force field that is in fact the territory of the story itself. We might say that the magic object is an outward and visible sign that reveals the connection between people or between events ... We might even say that in a narrative any object is always magic. ~ Italo Calvino

Why did popular songs always focus on romantic love? Why this preoccupation with first meetings, sad partings, honeyed kisses, heartbreak, when life was also full of children's births and trips to the shore and longtime jokes with friends? Once Maggie had seen on TV where archaeologists had just unearthed a fragment of music from who knows how many centuries B.C., and it was a boys lament for a girl who didn't love him back. Then besides the songs there were the magazine stories and the novels and the movies, even the hair-spray ads and the pantyhose ads. It struck Maggie as disproportionate. Misleading, in fact. ~ Anne Tyler

On Writing About Nora Hawks
I write about a female character to try, in vain, to understand two things: the purpose of life, and women. ~ Dennis R. Miller

My children came out as individuals in their own right. They were not my products. They had their own characters and were very strong-minded. I gave them a lot of freedom when they were still very young. The one thing they got from me is morals. They would never betray anyone. They are really good people. ~ Vivienne Westwood

The way the films look will never entertain an audience alone. It has to be in the service of a good story with great characters. ~ John Lasseter

I never talk to myself. I talk to the voices in my head, the characters in my stories and, of course, the other-dimensional beings who sometimes swing by on their way to another reality. ~ Alex G Zarate

But we should search for the strange and surprising in the world, not within ourselves! To search within, to think so long and hard about our own selves, would only make us unhappy. This is what had happened to the characters in my story: for this reason heroes could never tolerate being themselves, for this reason they always wanted to be someone else. ~ Orhan Pamuk

Is it the freedom of characters in fiction that we find so inspiring, or the way that freedom transforms them? ~ Marc Levy

I'm not a big fan of violent movies, it's not something I like to watch. And it's not my aim or goal to make a violent movie. My characters are very important, so when I'm trying to depict a certain character in my movie, if my character is violent, it will be expressed that way in the film. You cannot really deny what a character is about. To repeat, my movie end up becoming violent, but I don't start with the intent of making violent movies. ~ Takashi Miike

(Out of the Shadow is) Exceptional....Meticulously plotted, beautifully paced, its an intelligent, fascinating story that draws you in.
I couldn't put it down, a great read..
Winn, masterfully weaves together the lives of characters into a rich and vivid tapestry,
all the while exploring complex human emotions.
A definite page turner.

Patricia O'Halloran ~ J.K. Winn

I think we're fascinated by gangsters and that whole lifestyle and crossing the line. We get sort of stuck in our normal lives, if you will, and you want to be bigger than life and I think people somehow live through these sorts of characters. ~ Denzel Washington

He was the most wickedly handsome creature she had ever seen in all her days. His hair was black as night, his stature large, his muscles were etched with precision into his smooth skin, every last ripple chiseled into wicked perfection. ~ Madison Thorne Grey

Life is sometimes novel-shaped, mocking the efforts of those authors who, in an effort to make their novels life-shaped, spurn the easy symmetry and cheap resonance of reality. ~ Stephen Fry

'The Golden Compass' became a bad experience because the studio didn't have faith in the strength of the ideas of the novel, which is ironic because it's one of the greatest fantasy novels ever written, if not the greatest, and they took the religion out of it and tried to turn it into a popcorn movie. ~ Chris Weitz

Writing isn't about creating perfect characters. There's no such thing. It's about creating characters that are real; flawed
yet beautiful, in that they know they need another person. Needing someone else doesn't make them weak; if they believed all they needed was them self, they would be. A strong heroine isn't afraid to admit that a best friend, or soul mate, is exactly what they need at one moment or another. A strong heroine never stands alone. They stand tall; they believe in who they are. They are perfect in every human flaw, because as humans we are flawed. And in every flaw, I see the perfection of their souls. Writers breath life into simple words and create beings
flaws and all. ~ Cassandra Giovanni

Perhaps it was because his life as a human had been so happy and his life since becoming a vampire had been so lonely that Kian clung to any shred of humanity left in him. ~ D.A. Rhine

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 ~ Carl Henegan

Oh, I'm following President Obama on Twitter. I like my black history in 140 characters or less. ~ Baratunde R. Thurston

If you're writing a book that takes place in New York in the moment, you can't not write about 9-11; you can't not integrate it. My main character's view is the Statue of Liberty and the Trade Center. It doesn't have to take over, but it has to be acknowledged. ~ Richard Price

Nothing felt better to him than the act of waiting for her. As long as he believed it wasn't in vain, he was able to justify his presence. ~ Roy L. Pickering Jr.

Sometimes I feel that in religious content, religious drama, it's almost told like a tale, like an account of facts, and in 'A.D. The Bible Continues,' it's drama, it's real drama that we like to see on TV today, seeing the characters struggle and doubt and be completely in conflict with each other, kind of like 'House of Cards.' ~ Juan Pablo Di Pace

Novels, says Sartre, are not life, but they owe our power upon us, as upon himself as an infant, to the fact that they are somehow like life. In life, he once remarked, 'all ways are barred and nevertheless we must act. So we try to change the world; that is, to live as if the relations between things and their potentialities were governed not by deterministic processes but by magic.' The as if of the novel consists in a similar negation of determinism, the establishment of an accepted freedom by magic. We make up aventures, invent and ascribe the significance of temporal concords to those 'privileged moments' to which we alone award their prestige, make our own human clocks tick in a clockless world. And we take a man who is by definition de trop, and create a context in which he isn't.

The novel is a lie only as our quotidian inventions are lies. The power which goes to its making--the imagination --is a function of man's inescapable freedom. This freedom, in Mary Warnock's words, 'expresses itself in his ability to see things which are not.' It is by his fiction that we know he is free. It is not surprising that Sartre as ontologist, having to describe many kinds of fictive behaviour, invents stories to do so, thus moving into a middle ground between life and novel. .... ~ Frank Kermode

For those protagonists we tend to admire the most, the Inciting Incident arouses not only a conscious desire, but an unconscious one as well. These complex characters suffer intense inner battles because these two desire are in direct conflict with each other. No matter what the character consciously thinks he wants, the audience senses or realizes that deep inside he unconsciously wants the very opposite. ~ Robert McKee

Better yet, why don't you tell us why you're here?"
"Last time I checked, I live here, too," Collin said.
"Not you, that ... that ... ," Mr. Taylor said, pointing at me with his fork.
"Pig!" Regan shouted at me.
Collin's head whipped around in her direction.
"I'm sorry?" I asked, caught off guard.
"Pig ... do you want some of the roasted pig?" she asked, holding a platter of meat. ~ Nicole Gulla

There's a real emphasis on being witty in Scotland, even in crime novels. ~ Denise Mina

We don't recognize those times in our existence, when fate rolls around to sever relationships, to remove an object of such immense magnitude from our lives. No, on a whim it robs us of our last goodbyes and forces us to try and recall the most irrelevant of things like what they were clothed it the last time we saw them, what the expression was on their face. ~Acronis ~ Madison Thorne Grey

Authors often say that their novels are like their children, and you want your novel, just like your children, to reflect well on you. When it goes out into the world, you hope that it will make you proud. But like a parent, an author must learn that her novel has needs of its own, and they are not the same as the author's.
Yes, you want your son's behavior toward women to reflect a loving relationship with his mother. However, if a woman is compelled to think about that relationship whenever they're in bed together, something has gone very very wrong. ~ Howard Mittelmark

There are any number of reasons to want novels to survive. The way [Jonathan] Franzen thinks about it is that books can do things, socially useful things, that other media can't. He cites -- as one does -- the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard and his idea of busyness: that state of constant distraction that allows people to avoid difficult realities and maintain self-deceptions. With the help of cell phones, e-mail and handheld games, it's easier to stay busy, in the Kierkegaardian sense, than it's ever been.

Reading, in its quietness and sustained concentration, is the opposite of busyness. "We are so distracted by and engulfed by the technologies we've created, and by the constant barrage of so-called information that comes our way, that more than ever to immerse yourself in an involving book seems socially useful," Franzen says. "The place of stillness that you have to go to to write, but also to read seriously, is the point where you can actually make responsible decisions, where you can actually engage productively with an otherwise scary and unmanageable world. ~ Lev Grossman

I relate to those characters - and any character I play - in as much as I put myself in their positions and feel how I would personally deal with their experiences. ~ Nathan Fillion