All Quotes By Tag: Characters
“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.”
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“When writing, there are some scenes that are emotionally overwhelming. They completely overcome the author, and only when they do this can they cause a similar reaction in the reader.Through this, the author gets to experience multiple lives. If a character’s life flashes before their eyes, it flashes before the author’s eyes too, and he or she remembers it as his or her own.With reading, we get to live other lives vicariously, and this is doubly so with writing. It is like a lucid dream, where we guide the outcome. In this, we don’t merely write *about* a character — we momentarily *become* them, and walk as they walk, think as they think, and do as they do. When we return to our own life, we might return a little shaken, likely a little stronger, hopefully a little wiser.What is certain is that we return better, because experiencing the lives of others makes us understand their aims and dreams, their fears and foils, the challenges and difficulties, and joys and triumphs, that they face. It helps us grow and empathise, and see all the little pictures that make up the bigger one we see from the omniscience of the narrator.”
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“Sometimes I scare myself at how easily I slip inside my mind and live vicariously through these characters.”
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“What happens in my next chapter depends on whether I wake up feeling creative or murderous.”
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“Many of the characters are fools and they’re always playing tricks on meand treating me badly.”
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“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.”
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“If you treat your characters like people, they’ll reward you by being fully developed individuals.”
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“The principle I always go on in writing a novel is to think of the characters in terms of actors in a play. I say to myself, if a big name were playing this part, and if he found that after a strong first act he had practically nothing to do in the second act, he would walk out. Now, then, can I twist the story so as to give him plenty to do all the way through? I believe the only way a writer can keep himself up to the mark is by examining each story quite coldly before he starts writing it and asking himself it is all right as a story. I mean, once you go saying to yourself, “This is a pretty weak plot as it stands, but if I’m such a hell of a writer that my magic touch will make it okay,” you’re sunk. If they aren’t in interesting situations, characters can’t be major characters, not even if you have the rest of the troop talk their heads off about them.”(Interview, The Paris Review, Issue 64, Winter 1975)”
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“Sometimes it’s the suffering we don’t ask for that means the most.”
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“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.”
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“In the world of your story, your outline is like the Ten Commandments. Unfortunately, your characters are all Atheists.”
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“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.”
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“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.]”
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“Common man’s patience will bring him more happiness than common man’s power.”
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“Music is the fastest motivator in the world.”