Characters Quotes - Page 5

When you were making excuses someone else was making enterprise.

Most of the people readily accept the principle but resist its practice.

Stories start in all sorts of places. Where they begin often tells the reader of what to expect as they progress. Castles often lead to dragons, country estates to deeds of deepest love (or of hate), and ambiguously presented settings usually lead to equally as ambiguous characters and plot, leaving a reader with an ambiguous feeling of disappointment. That's one of the worst kinds.

Like the 'good' characters in literature, the sane don't have any memorable lines.

Every book begins and ends with other people- the readers who suggest the book to us and encourage us to read it, the talented author who crafted each word, the fascinating individuals we meet inside the pages- and the readers we discuss and share the book with when we finish.

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

We love our mother because she cares and also because she cooks.

T[he rules of writing] require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.

It is sometimes the minor, not the major, characters in a novel who hold the author's affection longest. It may be that one loses affection for the major characters because they suck off so much energy as one pushes them through their lives.

You can lead if you can serve. You can serve when you can love. You can love when you are graced. The truth is that God knows love will be needed in volumes, this is why he made his grace abundant. Leaders are lovers. Misleaders are haters!

Good becomes better by playing against better, but better doesn't become the best by playing against good.

Fashion doesn't make you perfect, but it makes you pretty.

I turned to the window. A single raindrop fell against it, and seeing my reflection in the glass, I suddenly knew why Finn’s eyes were familiar.They were exactly like mine.

There are two characters in me: a doodler and a tuner. And the only thing that makes me go crazy is when they both fight for their turn.

As an artist she finds Dick's work hopelessly naive, yet she is a lover of certain kinds of bad art, art which offers a transparency into the hopes and desires of the person who made it. Bad art makes the viewer much more active. (Years later Chris would realise that her fondness for bad art is exactly like Jane Eyre's attraction to Rochester, a mean horse-faced junkie: bad characters invite invention.

To a farmer dirt is not a waste, it is wealth.

A book is simply a snap shot of the full story.

Hundreds of thousands of people live in my library. Some are real, others are fictional. The real ones are the so-called imaginary characters in works of literature, the fictional ones are their authors. We know everything about the former, or at least as much as we are meant to know, everything that is written about a given character in a novel, a story or a poem in which she or he figures...The rest doesn't matter. Nothing is hidden from us. For us, a novel's characters are real. (p. 80

The only way you can talk about this great tide in which you’re a participant is as Schopenhauer did: the universe is a dream dreamed by a single dreamer where all the dream characters dream too.

Prudence is precaution, prudence is protection.

Discover everything about your characters that you can before you write your story. If you get stuck at any point, they will write your dialog for you.

Seed becomes tree, son becomes stranger.

I won't do this movie because I don't believe the love story," she told Selznick. "The heroine is an intellectual woman, and an intellectual woman simply can't fall in love so deeply.

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.

Dresses don't look beautiful on hangers.

By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that person knows himself or herself. You're sort of a predator, an invader of people.

No tricks, no tools, but talent makes a task truly top class.

Anyone can be a story. Everyone is.

...because there's a secret order. The books, you can't place them random. The other day I put Cervantes next to Tolstoj.And I thought, if close to Anna Karenina we have Don Quixote, sure the latter will do his best to save her.

Principles in a poor is admirable as politeness in a prince.

A good swordsman is more important than a good sword.

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

A true professional not only follows but loves the processes, policies and principles set by his profession.

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.

It [the Harlem Renaissance] was a time of black individualism, a time marked by a vast array of characters whose uniqueness challenged the traditional inability of white Americans to differentiate between blacks.