Literary Characters Quotes

I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen 'King Lear,' never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert's father's timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Unlike literary characters, our future is mostly shaped by small, trivial choices - seemingly insignificant, but deceptively fateful. ~ Guillermo Erades

You can't live with literary characters no matter how much you might like to. You can have them as imaginary friends that you can call up when you need to. One of the tasks of art is to provide people with companions. ~ Henning Mankell

Literary characters, like my grandmother's apparitions, are fragile beings, easily frightened; they must be treated with care so they will feel comfortable in my pages ~ Isabel Allende

We can be reluctant to recognize how much of our culture was literary, particularly now that so many of the institutional purveyors of literature happily have joined in proclaiming its death. A substantial number of Americans who believe they worship God actually worship three major literary characters: the Yahweh of the J Writer (earliest author of Genesis, Exodus, Numbers), the Jesus of the Gospel of Mark, and Allah of the Koran. ~ Harold Bloom

There's always an anxiety about playing literary characters because one of the great joys of reading books is that you can create your own vision of things. ~ Stephen Mangan

Whenever I've had to tamper with history for plot purposes, I make sure to mention that in my author's note, and I try to keep such tampering to a bare minimum. I also attempt to keep my characters true to their historical counterparts. This is not always possible, of course. ~ Sharon Kay Penman

I think that television lately has been extremely dark and, in some ways, cynical but I also think that people who are writing those shows probably feel exactly as I do - that sometimes the darkness of a story can highlight the light in a story. There's a lot of cynical stuff but I think it may be even more in movies now where you see so many movies about cynical and corrupted characters. That's the state of many movies right now but movies, television, all of culture, there's always going to be a battle between the stories that are cynical and stories that are hopeful. ~ Randall Wallace

I can't bear shopping. I can choose clothes for my characters, but not for myself. I've got no dress sense. Or I've lost it. ~ Richard C. Armitage

So, why do you write these strong female characters?
Because you're still asking me that question.
[Equality Now speech, May 15, 2006] ~ Joss Whedon

My favorite artists from comics were early ones like Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko who had a real heavy ink style. Captain America, co created by Jack Kirby, was a favorite of mine and I sometimes use an altered version of his costume on some of my characters. ~ Marcel Dzama

To leave a novel unfinished, is to leave the characters stranded. They become helpless abiding in their own fear, pain, conflict, or doom until the writer picks up the pen to save them or announces their fate. ~ Hannah N. Anderson

While I talked about comparisons between Cap and Cable, there's also a parallel with Tony Stark. Iron Man thinks of himself as a 'futurist,' Cable is from the future. Both have been at war with their own bodies. We look for characters with touch points to Cable. Their legacy means an enormous amount to him. ~ Jeph Loeb

I am thrilled to write 'The Treasure Chest,' and to bring to life not only the childhoods of famous people from history, but also the characters of Maisie and Felix, who I hope you will fall in love with just as I have! ~ Ann Hood

The best programs are written so that computing machines can perform them quickly and so that human beings can understand them clearly. A programmer is ideally an essayist who works with traditional aesthetic and literary forms as well as mathematical concepts, to communicate the way that an algorithm works and to convince a reader that the results will be correct. ~ Donald Ervin Knuth

I'd say I'm drawn to characters that ring true to me. Adolescence is a troubled time for everyone, so a lot of those characters have been troubled, tortured people. It's been a great way to navigate my adolescence by having these more troubled kids as an outlet. ~ Ezra Miller

The best plot twists are the ones you didn't expect. ~ Shannon L. Alder

I think it's important that we have strong, female characters in movies now, which can really leave an impression on people - especially young people - and that they're not 'sexy' or 'cool.' ~ Saoirse Ronan

Discover everything about your characters that you can before you write your story. If you get stuck at any point, they will write your dialog for you. ~ Michael J. Kannengieser

That is the beauty of having characters that don't make a big deal out of being gay, or lesbian, or whatever. They are just what they are, and that is acceptable - and that nobody should question that and that love is love. ~ Katrina Law

I've always liked shows that have a strong cast of secondary characters. One of the greatest examples ever I would say is 'The Simpsons.' If you think about it, you could name 100 characters recognizable from that show. I think 'Scrubs' has done a good job of having a strong team coming off the bench. ~ Neil Flynn

I let my characters do the talking, simple as that. ~ Terry McMillan

The more melancholy side of my literary personality is much in tune with BS Johnson's. ~ Jonathan Coe

I crave the diversity because I'm an actor and it's more fun to play different types of characters, but I'm pretty spontaneous as well, so I don't rule anything out. ~ Kristen Bell

As our characters in our 'X-FORCE' began to push at the boundaries of what 'X-FORCE' was, it made perfect story sense for the team to change their name. ~ Peter Milligan

Hush. Yellow is a happy color, and I'm trying to feel happy again. ~ V.M. Marsh

I still recommend reading travel guides as an insight to a traveller's perspective on fantasy worlds. Nearly all characters end up travelling at some point, and they have many of the same needs and concerns covered in travel guides. ~ Trudi Canavan

It is, of course, much easier for a literary character to take a risk for love. The realities of social strata and responsibility mean nothing but a plot point in today's modern literature, but outside of these stories we are not pushing for change. The ideals we embody in our art rarely play themselves out in our lives. What would happen if we took the example of our fictional heroes; what if each of us was a Don Juan? ~ Evelyn Pryce

I've been actively engaged with mythic imagery ever since I picked up that Rackham book, but it really came into focus for me when I moved from London to the country. As I walked the extraordinary landscape of Dartmoor, I looked at the trees and the rocks and the hills and I could see the personality in those forms ... then they metamorphosed under my pencil into faeries, goblins and trolls. After Alan and I published "Faeries", he moved on from the subject of faery folklore to illustrate Tolkien and other literary works ... while I discovered that my own exploration of Faerieland had only just begun. In the countryside, the old stories seemed to come alive around me; the faeries were a tangible aspect of the landscape, pulses of spirit, emotion, and light. They "insisted" on taking form under my pencil, emerging on the page before me cloaked in archetypal shapes drawn from nature and myth. I'd attracted their attention, you see, and they hadn't finished with me yet. ~ Brian Froud

Personal faintness, and an overpowering personal candour, were the distinguishing features of Mrs Billickin's organization. She came languishing out from her own exclusive back parlour, with the air of having been expressly brought-to for the purpose, from an accumulation of several swoons. ~ Charles Dickens

In a way, the characters often do take over. ~ Margaret Mahy

Imagine the literary buff, steeped in his beloved classics, rejoicing in a memory that sings, prepared to dispense kilowatts of goodwill, who fetches up at the Odeon on an off day. There are days like that, when everything rings hollow, and even the hollowness is unconvincing. There's nothing to be done about it: the inspiration's not there. He's left with a terrible sense of disappointment, resentment, against whom he doesn't exactly know: the playwright or the actors? All he can do is curl up in bed, alone, all alone, and console himself with suitably wrought alexandrines. ~ Jacques Yonnet

I am at the hospital waiting for my friend with Noah. Which is a very couple-like thing to do. All you have to do is watch any teen drama - anytime one of the characters is close to death and/or in a coma, the boyfriend/girlfriend teams always end up at the hospital together.
We are eating together. (Another coupley thing to do.)
We are talking about my best friend, his girlfriend, and their secret problems that she somehow neglected to tell me. Which means that Noah is the one telling me secrets that even my best friend won't.
I like it. All of it. Being here, eating food, telling secrets, everything ~ Lauren Barnholdt

I think it's a wonderful thing to have African-American characters. Look at life. It's not a white world or a black world; there are all kind of people in it. It's showing growth, and in today's world there are so many outlets. ~ Darius McCrary

Well, my mother always told me that reading SF would rot my mind, ruin my morals, and lead me into hanging around with disreputable characters. And thank God, she was right!" -- Bruce Arthurs ~ Bruce Arthurs

I usually dislike second books in series. The only second installment I ever loved was 'The Empire Strikes Back,' and I think that was wonderful because it evolved the characters while not seeming like a bridge. ~ Pierce Brown

When I became more involved in music, I had to give up some of my writing in the literary sense. However, on occasion, I would write something for my own pleasure or I would write notes and introductory remarks in the songbooks I put together. ~ Tom Glazer

I am attracted to characters who think they are in control, but their situation is uncontrollable. ~ Eric Bana

It seems to me that my whole life I've been standing on some tower or a pillbox or a trampoline, waving the names of writers, as if we needed rescue. And the first person I had to rescue was myself. ~ John Leonard

Literary poetry in a painter is something special, and is neither illustration nor the translation of writing by form. ~ Paul Gauguin

All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us. ~ Immanuel Kant

The visual and literary arts are of perennial interest to me, and these art forms have become more and more a part of my life; they have become companions of sorts. I cannot imagine my day to day experiences without the presence of these art forms. They're absolutely essential. ~ Michael Hersch

Although my stories are all very different on the surface, I like to write stories about characters struggling with big problems. I'm always reminded, no matter how different from me one of my characters is from me on the surface, how we're all pretty much the same underneath. ~ Morris Gleitzman

They would chase the image rising from death, expect it, but then enter an empty room with a shrine of deadened memorabilia that made them lose their minds. ~ Laura Gentile

I love playing confused, broken characters. ~ Nina Dobrev

As one might expect, lawyers don't rate very high on the trust meter. As one of my characters said in Chapter 4 of The Grievance Committee–Book One, "Only fiction writers and lawyers get paid to lie." So, can you trust a lawyer? ~ Frank R. Southers

A preface is a species of literary luxury, where an author, like a lover, is privileged to be egotistical ... ~ Letitia Elizabeth Landon

I thought to myself, who is this excellent man Van Doren who being employed to teach literature, teaches just that: talks about writing and about books and poems and plays: does not get off on a tangent about the biographies of the poets or novelists: does not read into their poems a lot of subjective messages which were never there? Who is this man who does not have to fake and cover up a big gulf of ignorance by teaching a lot of opinions and conjectures and useless facts that belong to some other subject? Who is this who really loves what he has to teach, and does not secretly detest all literature, and abhor poetry, while pretending to be a professor of it?...It was because of this virtual scholasticism of Mark's that he would never permit himself to fall into the naive errors of those who try to read some favorite private doctrine into every poet they like of ever nation or every age. And Mark abhorred the smug assurance with which second-rate left-wing critics find adumbrations of dialectical materialism in everyone who ever wrote from Homer and Shakespeare to whomever they happen to like in recent times. If the poet is to their fancy, then he is clearly seen to be preaching the class struggle. If they do not like him, then they are able to show that he was really a forefather of fascism. And all their literary heroes are revolutionary leaders, and all their favorite villains are capitalists and Nazis. ~ Thomas Merton

Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem. ~ Rick Moody

I think of setting as almost a character of its own, influencing the other characters in ways they're not even aware of. So much of the success of a good ghost story rides on creating a creepy atmosphere; details of the landscape itself can help create a sense of dread. ~ Jennifer McMahon

Is it not clear that to give to such women as desire it and can devote themselves to literary and scientific pursuits all the advantages enjoyed by men of the same class will lessen essentially the number of thoughtless, idle, vain and frivolous women and thus secure the [sic] society the services of those who now hang as dead weight? ~ Sarah Moore Grimke

A sunset, almost formidable in its splendor, would be lingering in the fully exposed sky. Among its imperceptibly changing amassments, one could pick out brightly stained structural details of celestial organisms, or glowing slits in dark banks, or flat, ethereal beaches that looked like mirages of desert islands. I did not know then (as I know perfectly well now) what to do with such things - how to get rid of them, how to transform them into something that can be turned over to the reader in printed characters to have him cope with the blessed shiver - and this inability enhanced my oppression. ~ Vladimir Nabokov