Characters Quotes

“Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“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, The Thirteenth Tale

“When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

“You take people, you put them on a journey, you give them peril, you find out who they really are.”
― Joss Whedon

“I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story.”
― G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America

“We are all fragments of the Source that have chosen to have an experience outside of Source and play different roles in a theatrical play of sorts. Some will play heroes and some will play villains; without all the characters, there wouldn’t be a play to enjoy. No play lasts forever, as that would cease to be entertaining and become boring. When the play is over, the curtain will fall. When the curtain rises, all of the players will be holding hands and congratulating each other on their well-played characters.”
― Jasun Ether, The Beasts of Success

“Sow a thought, and you reap an act;
Sow an act, and you reap a habit;
Sow a habit, and you reap a character;
Sow a character, and you reap a destiny.”
― Samuel Smiles, Happy Homes and the Hearts That Make Them

“Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“You look like a protagonist.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor & Park

“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.”
― Dean F. Wilson

“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

“Be sure not to discuss your hero's state of mind. Make it clear from his actions."

(Letter to Alexander Chekhov, May 10, 1886)”
― Anton Chekhov

“I don't know where people got the idea that characters in books are supposed to be likable. Books are not in the business of creating merely likeable characters with whom you can have some simple identification with. Books are in the business of creating great stories that make you're brain go ahhbdgbdmerhbergurhbudgerbudbaaarr.”
― John Green

“I care more about the people in books than the people I see every day.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“. . . clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“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

“I will go to my grave in a state of abject endless fascination that we all have the capacity to become emotionally involved with a personality that doesn't exist.”
― Berkeley Breathed

“Politeness is the first thing people lose once they get the power.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“I see God now as an unimaginative writer of popular fictions, someone who builds stories around sadistic and graceless plots, narratives that exist only to express His terror of a woman's power to choose who and how to love, to redefine love as she sees fit, not as God thinks it ought to be. The author is unworthy of His own characters.”
― Joe Hill, Horns

“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

“But some characters in books are really real--Jane Austen's are; and I know those five Bennets at the opening of Pride and Prejudice, simply waiting to raven the young men at Netherfield Park, are not giving one thought to the real facts of marriage.”
― Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

“If you're silent for a long time, people just arrive in your mind.”
― Alice Walker

“All worries are less with wine.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“The only characters I ever don't like are ones that leave no impression on me. And I don't write characters that leave no impression on me.”
― Lauren DeStefano

“When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away - even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations!"

(Letter to Alexander Chekhov, May 10, 1886)”
― Anton Chekhov

“When you don’t have honesty in love then there is no communication. Honesty is improvisation of the heart; anything less is a well thought out and rehearsed script.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Sometimes I scare myself at how easily I slip inside my mind and live vicariously through these characters.”
― Teresa Mummert

“Just me, my music, and the voices in my head.”
― Christie Silvers

“Father has a strengthening character like the sun and mother has a soothing temper like the moon.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words