Characters Quotes - Page 4

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.

I miss the days when I was alone with my characters and no one else knew them except me.

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.

The best stories come from deep within us and are of us. Either our inner child comes out to play and makes all things possible, or we mold our characters and events from our own experiences, or our dreams of wanting to experience.

You’re the girl that I have been wanting. You’re the girl that I could see myself with forever. And most importantly, you’re the girl that I’ve fallen in love with.

An assembly is extra slow in taking actions.

Action achieves ambition.

My spouse is my shield, my spouse is my strength.

Real people are made out of a whole lot of things—flesh, bone, blood, nerves, stuff like that. Literary people are made out of words.

I seem finally to have stopped worrying about Elinor, and age. She seems now to be perfectly normal -- about twenty-five, a witty control freak. I like her but I can see how she would drive you mad. She's just the sort of person you'd want to get drunk, just to make her giggling and silly.

We are all characters in the book of life.

In a democracy government is the God.

...it's not the stories - it's the pain and the joy and the people who stay with you long after the stories are told ...

If she says goodbye, someone else will say hi.

It is the sweat of the servants that make their squire look smart.

One of the key secrets of great writing is knowing where to start and when to stop.

With discipline, you can lose weight, you can excel in work, you can win the war.

The persons whom you cannot care for in a novel, because they are so bad, are the very same that you so dearly love in your life, because they are so good.

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.

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

The purpose of a profession is to fulfil the personal wishes of a prospect.

And who would dare write their own death into the script so that the rest of the characters in the tale might live? God of course.

The flimsy little protestations that mark the front gate of every novel, the solemn statements that any resemblance to real persons living or dead is entirely coincidental, are fraudulent every time. A writer has no other material to make his people from than the people of his experience ... The only thing the writer can do is to recombine parts, suppress some characterisitics and emphasize others, put two or three people into one fictional character, and pray the real-life prototypes won't sue.

Fail soon so that you can succeed sooner.

It's not a romance, it's a love story.

In a democracy, there will be more complaints but less crisis, in a dictatorship more silence but much more suffering.

Dresses won't worn out in the wardrobe, but that is not what dresses are designed for.

I'm 20 years old. I spend my days in a dictionary and half my mind in Fantasy.

One likes to think that there is some fantastic limbo for the children of imagination, some strange, impossible place where the beaux of Fielding may still make love to the belles of Richardson, where Scott’s heroes still may strut, Dickens’s delightful Cockneys still raise a laugh, and Thackeray’s worldlings continue to carry on their reprehensible careers. Perhaps in some humble corner of such a Valhalla, Sherlock and his Watson may for a time find a place, while some more astute sleuth with some even less astute comrade may fill the stage which they have vacated.

The mistakes of the world are warning message for you.

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).

Like most modern people, we no longer bothered to make the distinction between events in real life and the dramas of fictional worlds, and so the cliff-hanger that inevitably, reliably ended the hour held just as much or more importance to us as the newspaper that usually went from doorstep to garbage bin unread, and we speculated about the future lives of the characters that populated decayed mansions or desert isles as if they weren't inventions of other human minds.

Delicious days ahead for solitude and writing and, oh yes, the holiday meal with family. Live with my characters until term starts in 2012!

Besides it's not as though the prisoner can truly die, any more than a character in a novel can. You can always flip back to the first page, can't you?

All worries are less with wine.

I intend to see that justice is done by presiding, in the manner of the omnipotent Walter Mitty, as chief justice of a tribunal trying the case of those plotting further advances for the Chinese characters on an international scale. Emulating the operatic Mikado's "object all sublime... to let the punishment fit the crime," I hand down the following dread decree:Anyone who believes Chinese characters to be a superior system of writing that can function as a universal script is condemned to complete the task of rendering the whole of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address into Singlish.

Is the writer cruel that makes his characters suffer only to bring them to triumph or tragedy in the end?

The characters act for reasons that they can’t control and, as readers, we have to believe in their motivations, their sense of choice and in the reality of their suffering, even though, deep down, we know it’s all just puppetry on the part of the writer.

Father has a strengthening character like the sun and mother has a soothing temper like the moon.

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

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.

A good food is mouthwatering when you see it and finger licking when you eat it.

I will take what I can from Edward. And then I will let them fade into history, all the characters in this drama. Emma Matthews and the men who loved her, who became obsessed with her. They're not important to us now.

When writing fiction, you learn to only put things and characters in, that are going to progress your story. There is something to be learned about that approach in real life

A writer must empathize with all of their characters because he is the one that bestowed upon them both joy and misery.

You take people, you put them on a journey, you give them peril, you find out who they really are.

A poor, who hates power, once become powerful, hates poor.

Good story' means something worth telling that the world wants to hear. Finding this is your lonely task...But the love of a good story, of terrific characters and a world driven by your passion, courage, and creative gifts is still not enough. Your goal must be a good story well told.

Politeness is the first thing people lose once they get the power.

What's real and what's not? People we meet in books--Holden Caulfield, Captain Ahab, Huckleberry Finn, Harry Potter, Bilbo and Gandalf and Frodo-- can become more memorable, and more important to us than people with birth certificates and drivers' licenses. Characters spawned in an author's imagination find a home inside us. They make our lives richer. They become our best friends. They never disappoint. And they never die.

Just because something isn’t good doesn’t mean it’s bad.

In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations!", May 10, 1886)

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”)

Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.

Anger gets you into trouble, ego keeps you in trouble.

Arrogant men with knowledge make more noise from their mouth than making a sense from their mind.

I won't sacrifice my characters morals/intentions/motives for the sake of what I believe is right or wrong. If the action fits the character it will be written. That's that.

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.

A Dickens character to me is a theatrical projection of a character. Not that it isn't real. It's real, but in that removed sense. But Sherlock Holmes is simply there. I would be astonished if I went to 221 1/2 B Baker Street and didn't find

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.