Characters Quotes

Seed becomes tree, son becomes stranger.

~ Amit Kalantri

Before you worry about the beauty of your body, worry about the health of your body.

~ Amit Kalantri

You can not control the thought, but you can control the tongue.

~ Amit Kalantri

The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented.

~ Milan Kundera

Then you are a poet?' she asked, fingering the flyer in her pocket.'No not at all,' he waved his hand. 'I am merely a character in a poem.

~ Karen Tei Yamashita

When writing a novel a writer should create living people, people not characters. A character is a caricature.

~ Ernest Hemingway

In general there should be gay characters in YA because a) surprise, there are gay folks everywhere and b) in my opinion as a father, there’s not a damn thing wrong with my child encountering gay folks in her literature, because see point a).

~ John Scalzi

If you're silent for a long time, people just arrive in your mind.

~ Alice Walker

I'd write of people and places like I knew, and I'd make my characters talk everyday English; and I'd let the sun rise and set in the usual quiet way without much fuss over the fact. If I had to have villains at all, I'd give them a chance, Anne--I'd give them a chance. There are some terrible bad men the world, I suppose, but you'd have to go a long piece to find them...But most of us have got a little decency somewhere in us. Keep on writing, Anne.

~ L.m. Montgomery

Believe in your character. Animate (or write) with sincerity.

~ Glen Keane

It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.

~ William Faulkner

Never annoy an inspirational author or you will become the poison in her pen and the villian in every one of her books.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Over the years I have forged intimate familial ties with these characters, who are reflections of a portion of myself. Consequently, even a character who appeared only once in a short story waits now in the wings, concealed by the curtain, for his next appearance on-stage. Not one of them has ever broken free of his familial ties with me and disappeared for ever - at least, not within the confines of my heart.

~ Shūsaku Endō

As a writer, I demand the right to write any character in the world that I want to write. I demand the right to be them, I demand the right to think them and I demand the right to tell the truth as I see they are.

~ Quentin Tarantino

In the world of your story, your outline is like the Ten Commandments. Unfortunately, your characters are all Atheists.

~ Jefferson Smith

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.

~ Adam Johnson

Most people carry their demons around with them, buried down deep inside. Writers wrestle their demons to the surface, fling them onto the page, then call them characters.

~ C.k. Webb

If you treat your characters like people, they'll reward you by being fully developed individuals.

~ Don Roff

Many of the characters are fools and they're always playing tricks on meand treating me badly.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

Sometimes I scare myself at how easily I slip inside my mind and live vicariously through these characters.

~ Teresa Mummert

I thought about writing the character as male, but then I would be forced to portray him as a woman in a man's body.

~ Christopher Stocking

[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.

~ Umberto Eco

Out there, there is some kinda genius person... I am talking about Sherlock Holmes... First very fast talking + in the same full of knowledge.

~ Deyth Banger

Sacrifice of the self is sheer stupidity if sacrifice is not for the self.

~ Amit Kalantri

Most of the world’s problems are caused by people who made education compulsory, but personal development optional. Because of them, we have many intelligent people who lack good characters.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

Stop talking filthy things, It doesn't help anyone.

~ Satish David

There are always messages, even enigmas to be searched, mysteries to be solved in all of my books. I like to puzzle readers, but I do not make so to the point of being so complex that they will lose interest in the plot. And that for me is the essence of every great literature around the world, and that’s been so for ages.(....)Some were inpired by real life characters, some other books I wrote are hybrid fiction/non-fiction, so I pretty much get inspired by people who have lived, and even who are still breathing among us… so don’t get discouraged if I didn’t mention your personality traits yet. I might even have your name over my books, I must some day…

~ Ana Claudia Antunes

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.

~ Diane Setterfield

I care more about the people in books than the people I see every day.

~ Jo Walton

The characters within a book were, from a certain point of view, identical on some fundamental level ‒ there weren't any images of them, no physical tangibility whatsoever. They were pictures in the reader's head, constructs of imagination and ideas, given shape by the writer's work and skill and the reader's imagination. Parents, of a sort.

~ Jim Butcher

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

~ Shannon Hale

French Louis Seymour of the West Canada Creek, who knew how to survive all alone in a treacherous wilderness, and Mr. Alfred G. Vanderbilt of New York City and Raquette Lake, who was richer than God and traveled in his very own Pullman car, and Emmie Hubbard of the Uncas Road, who painted the most beautiful pictures when she was drunk and burned them in her woodstove when she was sober, were all ten times more interesting to me than Milton's devil or Austen's boy-crazy girls or that twitchy fool of Poe's who couldn't think of any place better to bury a body than under his own damn floor.

~ Jennifer Donnelly

I spend many hours in conversation with wonderful characters from fantastic books.

~ Patti Roberts

In a book, even the real bastards can't hurt you. And you can never loose a friend you make in a book. When you get to a sad part, no one's there to see you cry. Or wonder why you don't cry when you should.

~ Dean Koontz

And thus it happens that the reader, the closer he comes to the novel's end, the more he wishes he were back in the summer with which it begins, and finally, instead of following the hero onto the cliffs of suicide, joyfully turns back to that summer, content to stay there forever.

~ Franz Kafka

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.

~ James Rozoff

When people’s parallel truth collides with their real truth, they may have a hard time in subduing all the fanciful items and characters of their invented world. (“The day the mirror was talking back”)

~ Erik Pevernagie

Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.

~ Henry David Thoreau

Most of my novels were developped from dreams I had. A dreamer I AM! Literally , at 1 AM. A dream with 140 characters is to dream an impossible dream. Too many characters to develoo from it. But in twitter that worked just fine for me

~ Ana Claudia Antunes

Everyday I think about the perfect life with you, Everyday I wish you existed.

~ Suchet Chaturvedi