Protagonists Quotes

My father used to say that all protagonists were versions of the author who wrote them - even if it meant the author had to acknowledge a side of himself that he did not know existed. It just required courage. ~ Catherine Lowell

Most of 'Let the Great World Spin' is centered on the day in 1974 when Philippe Petit walked on a tightrope between the two towers of the World Trade Center, creating an astonishing spectacle that intersects with the lives of many of the novel's multiple protagonists. ~ Susan Barker

One can believe James's claim to an "imagination of disaster"; so many of his protagonists are unhappy in the end, and yet he gives them an aura of victory. It is because these characters depend on such high degree on their own sense of integrity that for them, victory has nothing to do with happiness. It has more to do with a settling within oneself, a movement inward that makes them whole. ~ Azar Nafisi

Ushering

Under reign of dystopic melodies
and optimistic lyrics
Two Delusional hopefuls we swept under our wings
and squeezed out our tears over
over the years to make them grow
Our saint-like protagonists
Our best bet and last chance ~ Bunny Rogers

Dreams have consequences. There is no turning back. A revolution is not a painless march to the gates of freedom and justice. It is a struggle between rage and hope, between the temptation to destroy and the desire to build. Its temperament is desperate. It is a tormented response to the past, to all that has happened, the recalled and unrecalled injustices - for the memory of a revolution reaches much further back than the memory of its protagonists. ~ Hisham Matar

Nobody is ever just a straight up protagonist or antagonist - everybody's morally ambiguous. ~ Cheyenne Jackson

The great protagonists are those who fight for their ideas and ideals despite the fact that they receive no recognition at the hands of their contemporaries. They are the men whose memories will be enshrined in the hearts of the future generations. It seems then as if each individual felt it his duty to make retroactive atonement for the wrong which great men have suffered at the hands of their contemporaries. Their lives and their work are then studied with touching and grateful admiration. Especially in dark days of distress, such men have the power of healing broken hearts and elevating the despairing spirit of a people. ~ Adolf Hitler

I'm more comfortable writing traditional protagonists. But 'Steve Jobs' and 'The Social Network' have antiheroes. I like to write antiheroes as if they're making their case to God about why they should be allowed into heaven. I have to find something in that character that is like me and write to that. ~ Aaron Sorkin

It seems to me that most good protagonists are both clever and resourceful. They are intelligent and can fix things, both little and big. They can come up with inventive solutions others would never think of. ~ Keren Woodward

I have confronted theoretical positions whose protagonists claim that what I take to be historically produced characteristics of what is specifically modern are in fact the timelessly necessary characteristics of all and any moral judgment, of all and any selfhood. ~ Alasdair MacIntyre

We may be the protagonists of tragedy, but we are also the heroes of our most beautiful and thrilling experiences. ~ Shin Kyung-sook

Many fervent Christians who are moved by the Passion and death of Christ on the Cross no longer have the strength to weep or to utter a cry of pain to the priests and bishops who make their appearance as entertainers and set themselves up as the main protagonists of the Eucharist. These believers tell us nevertheless: "We do not want to gather with men around a man! We want to see Jesus! Show him to us in the silence and humility of your prayer! ~ Robert Sarah

I think as women we've always been very used to growing up reading and identifying with male protagonists, especially in fantasy. There's a saying in publishing that girls will read about boys, but boys will only read about boys, and it's important to give women strong heroines. ~ Cassandra Clare

I couldn't imagine what Fox thought they were doing, contemplating such a jagged protagonist for a prime-time drama. I only knew that I wanted the role very much. ~ Hugh Laurie

But no one wants to listen to our sad stories unless they are smoothed over with a joke or nice melody. And even then, not always. No one wants to hear a woman talking or writing about pain in a way that suggests that it doesn't end. Without a pat solution, silver lining, or happy ending we're just complainers -- downers who don't realize how good we actually have it.

Men's pain and existential angst are the stuff of myth and legends and narratives that shape everything we do, but women's pain is a backdrop- a plot development to push the story along for the real protagonists. Disrupting that story means we're needy or shellfish, or worst of all, man-haters - as if after all men have done to women over the ages the mere act of not liking them for it is most offensive. ~ Jessica Valenti

Films with female protagonists don't attract many eyeballs. Most of them are perceived as feminist films. If Bollywood starts giving women major roles in entertaining movies, then the audience, too, will open up to the idea of watching commercial films in which the actresses do more than just play the role of the hero's love interest. ~ Bipasha Basu

This is not the "relativism of truth" presented by journalistic takes on postmodernism. Rather, the ironist's cage is a state of irony by way of powerlessness and inactivity: In a world where terrorism makes cultural relativism harder and harder to defend against its critics, marauding international corporations follow fair-trade practices, increasing right-wing demagoguery and violence can't be answered in kind, and the first black U.S. president turns out to lean right of center, the intelligentsia can see no clear path of action. Irony dominates as a "mockery of the promise and fitness of things," to return to the OED definition of irony.

This thinking is appropriate to Wes Anderson, whose central characters are so deeply locked in ironist cages that his films become two-hour documents of them rattling their ironist bars. Without the irony dilemma Roth describes, we would find it hard to explain figures like Max Fischer, Steve Zissou, Royal Tenenbaum, Mr. Fox, and Peter Whitman. I'm not speaking here of specific political beliefs. The characters in question aren't liberals; they may in fact, along with Anderson himself, have no particular political or philosophical interests. But they are certainly involved in a frustrated and digressive kind of irony that suggests a certain political situation. Though intensely self-absorbed and central to their films, Anderson's protagonists are neither heroes nor antiheroes. These characters are not lovable eccentrics. They a ~ Arved Mark Ashby

Dogwood Blues by Brenda Sutton Rose is a masterful work of classic small-town fiction. ~ Janice Daugharty

Like dreams, his texts combine precise "realistic" detail with absurdity, careful observation and reasoning on the part of the protagonists with inexplicable obliviousness and carelessness. ~ Hartmut M. Rastalsky

Women are never the protagonists; we're always reactionary against everything that's done to us. I like people who write for women that have got a bit more about them. ~ Neve McIntosh

My writing is a very authentic journey of discovery. I'm going out there to learn who I am. My readers, consequently, take the same journey as my protagonist. ~ Ted Dekker

Employing women as my primary protagonists has allowed me to step outside of myself, to distance myself from my own personality, far more easily than were I to look at events from a masculine perspective. ~ Tom Robbins

I had the feeling that focusing on objects and telling a story through them would make my protagonists different from those in Western novels - more real, more quintessentially of Istanbul. ~ Orhan Pamuk

Good story thrives on protagonists in pain. ~ Chuck Wendig

A common error of western commentators who seek to interpret Islamism sympathetically is to view it as a form of localised resistance to globalisation. In fact, Islamism is also a universalist political project. Along with Neoliberals and Marxists, Islamists are participants in a dispute about how the world as whole is to be governed. None is ready to entertain the possibility that it should always contain a diversity of regimes. On this point, they differ from non-western traditions of thinking in India, China and Japan, which are much more restrained in making universal claims.

In their unshakeable faith that one way of living is best for all humankind, the chief protagonists in the dispute about political Islam belong to a way of thinking that is quintessentially western. As in Cold War times, we are led to believe we are locked in a clash of civilisations: the West against the rest. In truth, the ideologues of political Islam are western voices, no less than Marx or Hayek. The struggle with radical Islam is yet another western family quarrel. ~ John N. Gray

Where did the fiction go?
When did we begin to write off literature when its contents contained a character who remained true to themselves?
It's not my job as an author to create a character everyone likes, one who personifies perfection.
However…it is my job to be true to the character's personality, even when their attributes are dark, demented, and contrary to all we believe, or have been taught is right.
It is my job to show the reader, the good, bad, and the ugly of the protagonist's true nature that resides within them.
It is not my job to create a character everyone loves, adores, agrees, and sides with.
True literature remains true to the characters within the pages they inhabit; even when the readers may not understand or agree with their integrity or lack thereof.
As an author I share a bond with each and every character within the books I write. Though they are figments of my imagination, they are alive, and to them I will always remain true; even when the reader may, or may not understand.
©2015 Suzanne Steele ~ Suzanne Steele

Fiction is about human beings, first and foremost. (It's not impossible to write fiction with no human protagonists, but it's very hard to keep the reader interested ... ) ~ Charles Stross

As much as I love to dive into the action early, I think the hero's journey is important - the idea that the reader needs to experience the protagonist's everyday life before you turn that world upside down. ~ Kami Garcia

I find myself writing protagonists who do feel pretty cut off from others but who want to make connections and aren't very good at it. ~ Leni Zumas

Today, women have as much of a place as protagonists and antagonist as men. ~ JP Wolfe

Look at the Coen brothers. All their minor characters are as interesting as their protagonists. If the smaller characters are well-written, the whole world of the film becomes enriched. It's not the size of the thing, but the detail. ~ Brendan Gleeson

When I first began writing In the Country of Men all I had was the voice of the protagonist. He intrigued me and my desire to want to know him and his world became almost compulsive. ~ Hisham Matar

Hwang Jung-eun is one of the brightest stars of the new South Korean generation - she's Han Kang's favourite, and the novel we're publishing scooped the prestigious Bookseller's Award, for critically-acclaimed fiction that also has a wide popular appeal. She stands out for her focus on social minorities - her protagonists are slum inhabitants, trans women, orphans - and for the way she melds this hard-edged social critique with obliquely fantastical elements and offbeat dialogue. ~ Deborah Smith

The dictionary definition of popularity is "to be liked by many." Based on this definition, you might predict that popular students are the cheeriest and most agreeable people in a school: kind to everyone and always willing to lend a helping hand. Such a conclusion couldn't be further from the truth! In the novel How to Be Popular by Meg Cabot, the protagonist's mother naively asks, "Aren't the most popular kids the nicest at your school? ~ Alex L. Freedman

Real literature was about psychological, emotional, and social truth as demonstrated by the actions and reflections of its protagonists; the novel was about character developed over time. ~ Julian Barnes

Any claim to actual identification as a drama must rest upon the construction of a plot independent of the assignment of affliction to the protagonist. ~ David Mamet

The sense of tragedy - according to Aristotle - comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist's weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I'm getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues.
...
[But] we accept irony through a device called metaphor. And through that we grow and become deeper human beings. ~ Haruki Murakami

The Internet is the hope of an integrated world without frontiers, a common world without controlling owners, a world of opportunities and equality. This is a utopia that we have been dreaming about and is a world in which each and every one of us are protagonists of a destiny that we have in our hands. ~ Laura Chinchilla

Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists. ~ Norman Mailer

I first read The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit when I was eighteen. It felt as though the author had taken every element I'd ever want in a story and woven them into one huge, seamless narrative; but more important, for me, Tolkien had created a place, a vast, beautiful, awesome landscape, which remained a resource long after the protagonists had finished their battles and gone their separate ways. In illustrating The Lord of the Rings I allowed the landscapes to predominate. In some of the scenes the characters are so small they are barely discernible. This suited my own inclinations and my wish to avoid, as much as possible, interfering with the pictures being built up in the reader's mind, which tends to be more closely focussed on characters and their inter-relationships. I felt my task lay in shadowing the heroes on their epic quest, often at a distance, closing in on them at times of heightened emotion but avoiding trying to re-create the dramatic highpoints of the text. With The Hobbit, however, it didn't seem appropriate to keep such a distance, particularly from the hero himself. I don't think I've ever seen a drawing of a Hobbit which quite convinced me, and I don't know whether I've gotten any closer myself with my depictions of Bilbo. I'm fairly happy with the picture of him standing outside Bag End, before Gandalf arrives and turns his world upside-down, but I've come to the conclusion that one of the reasons Hobbits are so quiet and elusive is to avoid the pr ~ Alan Lee (artist)

My protagonists are my mother's voice and the mind I had when I was thirteen. ~ Harold Brodkey

Respect your characters, even the ­minor ones. In art, as in life, everyone is the hero of their own particular story; it is worth thinking about what your minor characters' stories are, even though they may intersect only slightly with your protagonist's. ~ Sarah Waters

The idea in The Man that Would Be King was that the music should recreate all that majestic surrounding and emphasize the adventure, but also speak about the frustration or, rather said, the curse of both protagonists, even before happened what happens them. ~ Maurice Jarre

An ambitious, surreal tale of the love between a young Arab girl sold into marriage and the orphan boy she adopts, 'Habibi' spans multiple eras of conflict and change, stretching the lifetimes of its two protagonists over many centuries. ~ G. Willow Wilson

Is it unprecedented for two goalkeepers employed in a match comprising seven goals to be the fixture's most competent protagonists? ~ Pete Gill

Georgia Author Brenda Sutton Rose captures some of the conflicted and captivating characters of a rapidly changing South. ~ Janisse Ray

As such, anything is always possible, even if your protagonist is a plumber. But it's the possibility, the limitless possibilities, of any fake life, that make writing about it so challenging. ~ Heidi Julavits

I've been playing with this idea in my mind that the hero's journey that we're all taught as screenwriters may resonate more specifically for male protagonists and maybe even male viewers. ~ Jill Soloway

It may sound very strange, but I love the freedom that writing a novel gives me. It is an unhindered experience. If I come after a bad day, I can decide that my protagonist will die on page 100 of my novel in a 350-page story. ~ Ashwin Sanghi

A true nature is a gloomy monolith, sort of like that old black rotary phone that I had to sing 'Happy Birthday' to Grandpa on. But novelists, damn us, still need true natures - so we can give them to our protagonists. And so readers can vaguely predict how they'll behave when we trap them in 'situations' that they can't IM their way out of. ~ Walter Kirn

I've seen middle grade books criticized by adult readers for leaving things for the reader to figure out, for not having perfect happily-ever-after endings. They get knocked for being too depressing, for using too many big words, for featuring parental characters who are too clueless. Girl protagonists are "too angry" or "too self-absorbed." The issues raised are "too heavy," the books "too earnest," "too quiet," "too hard," "too far-reaching," "too strange," and it is all too too much for the reader.

Except it's never the readers themselves saying these things.

Our critical discourse in middle grade is sometimes much more about what the reviewer believes children's books should be rather than about engaging with the book itself and the literature as a whole. When we say a book is "too sad," "too scary," "too complicated;" when we demand that endings are perfectly happy and all tied up; when we demand that the themes not be too weighty or the characters not face too much hardship; we are projecting our own biases onto the book, and using them to prescribe what books for this age range can or cannot do. This is nannying, not literary criticism - and it doesn't give kids much credit. ~ Anne Ursu

Wolf Boy is absolutely beguiling. Evan Kuhlman has boundless empathy for all his characters, and his wonderful protagonist Stephen is, in turn, boundlessly inventive ... This is an auspicious debut. ~ Valerie Sayers

The depth of any story is proportionate to the protagonist's commitment to their goal, the complexity of the problem, and the grace of the solution. ~ Steve House

The more complex and overwhelming the threat to a protagonist, the better the opportunity for the author to create a compelling conflict and a dramatic resolution. ~ Terry Brooks

Tokyo Heist is a fast-paced, exotic reading adventure, a story where The da Vinci Code meets the wildly popular manga genre! Author Diana Renn infuses protagonist Violet with plenty of chikara (power) and Renn's fresh, spot-on author's voice is irresistible. I couldn't put it down! ~ Alane Ferguson

The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them. Most important, the grand narratives of emancipation and enlightenment mobilized people in the colonial world to rise up and throw off imperial subjection; in the process, many Europeans and Americans were also stirred by these stories and their protagonists, and they too fought for new narratives of equality and human community. ~ Edward W. Said

Some undefined sorrow was hidden in the hearts of the protagonists as they stood in silence beneath the leafless trees and when the moment of farewell had come the kiss, which had been withheld by one, was given by both. ~ James Joyce

This dazzling, unput-downable debut novel proves beyond a doubt that Dan Wells has the gift. His teenage protagonist is as chilling as he is endearing. More John Wayne Cleaver, please. ~ F. Paul Wilson

I'm drawn particularly to stories that evolve out of the character of the protagonist. ~ David McCullough

Today everyone on our side knows that criminality is not the result of the Algerian's congenital nature nor the configuration of his nervous system. The war in Algeria and wars of national liberation bring out the true protagonists. We have demonstrated that in the colonial situation the colonized are confronted with themselves. They tend to use each other as a screen. Each prevents his neighbor from seeing the national enemy. And when exhausted after a sixteen-hour day of hard work the colonized subject collapses on his mat and a child on the other side of the canvas partition cries and prevents him from sleeping, it just so happens it's a little Algerian. When he goes to beg for a little semolina or a little oil from the shopkeeper to whom he already owes several hundred francs and his request is turned down, he is overwhelmed by an intense hatred and desire to kill - and the shopkeeper happens to be an Algerian. When, after weeks of keeping a low profile, he finds himself cornered one day by the kaid demanding "his taxes," he is not even allowed the opportunity to direct his hatred against the European administrator; before him stands the kaid who excites his hatred - and he happens to be an Algerian. ~ Frantz Fanon

Since I hold no judgments against my characters, no matter how heinous they might seem, I present them as real people with their own moral centers. We might feel those moral centers are mis-calibrated, but they are there and are the rudders that propel them. This makes reading my work a visceral roller coaster, 'cause the reader must embark on the journey of the protagonist equipped only with his or her own moral center. ~ Chris Abani

How can so many (white, male) writers narratively justify restricting the agency of their female characters on the grounds of sexism = authenticity while simultaneously writing male characters with conveniently modern values?

The habit of authors writing Sexism Without Sexists in genre novels is seemingly pathological. Women are stuffed in the fridge under cover of "authenticity" by secondary characters and villains because too many authors flinch from the "authenticity" of sexist male protagonists. Which means the yardstick for "authenticity" in such novels almost always ends up being "how much do the women suffer", instead of - as might also be the case - "how sexist are the heroes".

And this bugs me; because if authors can stretch their imaginations far enough to envisage the presence of modern-minded men in the fake Middle Ages, then why can't they stretch them that little bit further to put in modern-minded women, or modern-minded social values? It strikes me as being extremely convenient that the one universally permitted exception to this species of "authenticity" is one that makes the male heroes look noble while still mandating that the women be downtrodden and in need of rescuing.

-Comment at Staffer's Book Review 4/18/2012 to "Michael J. Sullivan on Character Agency ~ Foz Meadows

For the blockbusters, people were always telling me that if you write female protagonists, the boys won't go, so you have to put the boys' stuff in it to get everybody. I write for people from 8 to 80, and that's not easy. ~ Linda Woolverton

I do think that I have a more flexible view of the interactions between people, and between human and non-human protagonists, humans and their landscapes. ~ Karen Russell

You's always at da place you is always post to be." Smokes ~ Javan Bonds

When I wrote the first [Bond novel] in 1953, I wanted Bond to be an extremely dull, uninteresting man to whom things happened ... when I was casting around for a name for my protagonist I thought by God, [James Bond] is the dullest name I ever heard. ~ Ian Fleming

I'm interested in flawed protagonists. I was raised on them. ~ Laura Dern

It does not matter what kind of self-destruction you choose – as if the protagonists in Furmani – Sokolov let say conscious of inevitability of their ontological and eschatological destiny, which they by no means want to change, but they accept it with joy of their own and peculiar optimism. Someone buries herself/himself in the library, and someone in a suburban tavern – they would say – the result is the same. The starting point is always that of futility, and the ultimate goal is destruction, which leads to self-destruction of all that restrains them from the total immersion in their own suffering and the pain of their own existence. ~ Ivo Žurić

In most films - especially in regards to the protagonist - really from the get-go they set up some scenario that endears that character to the audience. Or imbues him with some nobility or heroism or something. ~ Joaquin Phoenix

I tend to work on the principle that much humour relies on cognitive dissonance - on the foreground not matching the background, on the protagonist's response to a situation being inappropriate, and so on. ~ Charles Stross

The saddest of the tales are those which have no words reserved for the protagonist's Mother to speak! ~ Ashfaq Saraf

The nature of the universe probably depends heavily on who is the actual protagonist. Lately I've been suspecting it's one of my cats. ~ Wil McCarthy

I read a lot. I listen a lot. I think a lot. But so little remains. The books I read, their plots, their protagonists fade. The university lectures that I had found pretty impressive on first hearing, have faded away. Now I am listening to one on Pirandello. Names of people, books, cities. They are already fading away. Even the titles of films I've seen recently - they have already faded. Authors of thousands of books I've read... All that remains are the colours of their bindings, their covers. I don't remember much about Beauty and the Beast, but I remember clearly, vividly the hear of the day as we were crossing the Rhine bridge, to see the film. Everything that I see, or red, or listen to, connects, translates into moods, bits of surroundings, colors. No, I am not a novelist. No precision of observation, detail. With me, everything is mood, mood, or else - simply nothingness. ~ Jonas Mekas

At the heart of any successful film is a powerful story. And a story should be just that: a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end, powerful protagonists that audiences can identify with, and a dramatic arc that is able to capture and hold viewers' intellectual and emotional attention. ~ Julia Bacha

What helped me a lot was that I chose an American lead protagonist, because that liberated a lot from my own knowledge. If I had approached it from the perspective of an Indian main character, I think I would have assumed a lot of knowledge and I would have resented the presence of the author. ~ Karan Bajaj

How do you get the protagonists and antagonists together, in the same space, without somebody having to die? So, we ended up having to tell two distinct stories, which is never the ultimate way to create a great serialized drama. So then, of course, we had the tragedy with Andy [Whitfield], which made everything very difficult and pushed back. ~ Chris Albrecht

The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love, and then we torture them. The more we love them, and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story. ~ Janet Fitch

We may think of ourselves as static anti-heroes, but in reality we're dynamic protagonists just waiting for our courage to kick in. ~ Justin Alcala

I always felt a little worm inside me: 'Now you need to write a novel with a woman protagonist.' ~ Carlos Fuentes

The relationship between physics and war is clear: the ruler and the general want to threaten or obliterate targets; destruction requires energy; the physicist is the expert on matter, motion, and energy. It's the physicist who invents the bomb. But to destroy a target, you have to locate it precisely, identify it accurately, and track it as it moves. That's where astrophysics comes in. Neither protagonists nor accomplices, astrophysicists are accessories to war. We don't design the bombs. We don't make the bombs. We don't calculate the damage a bomb will wreak. Instead, we calculate how stars in our galaxy self-destruct through thermonuclear explosions – calculations that may prove helpful to those who do design and make thermonuclear bombs. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

I would agree with your statement that many of my protagonists are outsiders. I wonder if we all are, and even people who don't think they are, and they're just better at masking it. When we shut our bedroom door at night, however well-integrated we think we are with the rest of society, maybe there's something illusory about that ... ~ David Mitchell

I'm so fucking tired of black women always being described by their skin tones! Honey-colored this! Dark-chocolate that! My paternal grandmother was mocha-tinged, café-au-lait, graham-fucking-cracker brown! How come they never describe the white characters in relation to foodstuffs and hot liquids? Why aren't there any yogurt-colored, egg-shell-toned, string-cheese-skinned, low-fat-milk white protagonists in these racist, no-third-act-having books? That's why black literature sucks! ~ Paul Beatty

While books provided me with some escape from the mental and physical horrors of my early life, they were unreliable. Many times the protagonists suffered terribly and then died at the end. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

There is a social contract in "Fight Club" and in "Choke" where the protagonist has deceived a whole bunch of people. In "Choke" it's all of these people who think that they've saved his life, and really care about him because they've embraced him and they've been his saviors. In "Fight Club" it's all of these people who are dying of various diseases, and they thought that Edward Norton was also dying so they allowed him really strong pent-up emotions. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

If the point of life is the same as the point of a story, the point of life is character transformation. If I got any comfort as I set out on my first story, it was that in nearly every story, the protagonist is transformed. He's a jerk at the beginning and nice at the end, or a coward at the beginning and brave at the end. If the character doesn't change, the story hasn't happened yet. And if story is derived from real life, if story is just condensed version of life then life itself may be designed to change us so that we evolve from one kind of person to another. ~ Donald Miller

A lot of crime fiction writing is also lazy. Personality is supposed to be shown by the protagonist's taste in music, or we're told that the hero looks like the young Cary Grant. Film is the medium these writers are looking for. ~ Peter Temple

As long as the protagonist wants something, the audience will want something. ~ David Mamet

'What It Is' was based on this class I've been teaching for 10 years - I wanted to write a book about writing that didn't mention stuff like story structure, protagonists, and all those things that we know about only because they already exist in stories. ~ Lynda Barry

I'm drawn to characters who bear similarities to the protagonists in myths and legends. ( ... ) ~ Alan Lee

The Hawk and the Dove is a wonderful idea for a book, wonderfully carried out. Nicholas Thompson has used illuminating new material to present each of his protagonists in a convincing, respectful, but unsparing way. Even more valuable, he has used the interactions and tensions between Paul Nitze and George Kennan to bring much of American 20th century foreign policy to life, with human richness ever present but with the big issues clear in all their complexity. ~ James Fallows

I always think once you have the lead protagonist, you cast around that character. ~ Nicolas Winding Refn

In short, when we read a story, we really do slip into the protagonist's skin, feeling what she feels, experiencing what she experiences. And what we feel is based, 100 percent, on one thing: her goal, which then defines how she evaluates everything the other characters do. If we don't know what she wants, we have no idea how, or why, what she does helps her achieve it. As Pinker is quick to point out, without a goal, everything is meaningless.6 It ~ Lisa Cron

I'd been upstaged, demoted from protagonist in my own drama to comic relief in my parents' tragedy ~ Alison Bechdel

No lies, my love, no lies between us. ~ T. Frohock

I always think that it's wrong to put images of my protagonists on the cover of my novels because readers can identify with characters only if they are given the chance to imagine them independently. ~ Orhan Pamuk

They had the magic pill, the solution to the inertia and frustration that has plagued the great literary protagonists I'd related to all my life - be it Leopold Bloom, Alex Portnoy, or Piglet from Winnie the Pooh. As ~ Neil Strauss

And against whom is this censorship directed? By way of answer, think back to the big subcultural debates of 2011 – debates about how gritty fantasy isn't really fantasy; how epic fantasy written from the female gaze isn't really fantasy; how women should stop complaining about sexism in comics because clearly, they just hate comics; how trying to incorporate non-Eurocentric settings into fantasy is just political correctness gone wrong and a betrayal of the genre's origins; how anyone who finds the portrayal of women and relationships in YA novels problematic really just wants to hate on the choices of female authors and readers; how aspiring authors and bloggers shouldn't post negative reviews online, because it could hurt their careers; how there's no homophobia in publishing houses, so the lack of gay YA protagonists can only be because the manuscripts that feature them are bad; how there's nothing problematic about lots of pretty dead girls on YA covers; how there's nothing wrong with SF getting called 'dystopia' when it's marketed to teenage girls, because girls don't read SF. Most these issues relate to fear of change in the genre, and to deeper social problems like sexism and racism; but they are also about criticism, and the freedom of readers, bloggers and authors alike to critique SFF and YA novels without a backlash that declares them heretical for doing so.


It's not enough any more to tiptoe around the issues that matter, refusing to name the wor ~ Foz Meadows

The Greeks were the first intellectualists. In a world where the irrational had played the chief role, they came forward as the protagonists of the mind. ~ Edith Hamilton

The glory of the protagonist is always paid for
by a lot of secondary characters ~ Tony Hoagland

The proverb, "Where there's a will.." sums it up for a writer who had just started in his writing life; for himself, the fictional characters and the audience of his works. It's a trinity of perspectives; one of his struggle, another of the story character which he writes about and the last one of the reader's expectation of his protagonists. ~ Lucas Michael