You’ve either got to find a way to make your continuing characters insteresting without making them maudlin or overwrought, or you’ve got to put more emphasis on the suspects.

We love fantasy novels in which the characters think that they’re peasants but turn out to be princes and kings.

Meeting everyone you wanted to know in the small surf industry, I saw how the surf trade was made up of characters that not only surfed, but were able to develop a business out of...

I think people enjoy a series. When you like a story, many readers want more of the same, which is dandy, if the author and the characters have more to say.

The novels we read allow us to encounter possible persons, versions of ourselves hat we would never see, never permit ourselves to see, never permit ourselves to become, in places we can never go and...

I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed...

In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations!”(Letter to Alexander Chekhov, May 10, 1886)

I like shows that are surprising and not predictable. That have deep, rich characters that are fully formed.

I really love idiot, enlightened characters – these characters who fail to engage with the drama of their immediate circumstances; they fail to be reactive and enrolled by drama as it happens around them.

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

I think one of the things you have to learn if you’re going to create believable characters is never to make generalizations about groups of people.

We are all characters in the book of life.

You do get fond of your characters. Handing them on is like giving a child to a nanny.

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.

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...

Yeah, you know, within the context of TV families, these are pretty unsavory characters.

The time for a person to instantly interact with his own soul, inspect his own mind and introspect with his own heart to identify his true quality of life is when too many people are...

I think I have so much more to accomplish in this world of acting. There are many different types of characters I want to play. I want to keep making people laugh, and I want...

Chairman Mao not only introduced Pinyin in China, but also simplified half the Chinese characters, believing that fewer strokes would enable more people to learn to write the characters.

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.

The fact is, it was a big show. We were a part of that show. Everybody watches for different reasons. There were some people who were tuning in that day to see what was going...

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

I’m a big fan of ‘Star Wars.’ Some of the most iconic characters of ‘Star Wars,’ we didn’t see their faces but to this day you can say Jabba the Hutt or Darth Vader and...

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...

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

I decided that, if I were to write a teen series, I’d want to set it in a place that was familiar to me – Manhattan, where I’d grown up – and I’d model the...

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.

Outside Styx’s apartment was not the first time Rochester and I had met, or would it be the last. We first encountered each other at Haworth House in Yorkshire when my mind was young and...

There are stages we all go through when dealing with character deaths. Grief. Anger. Denial. Laughter. Coulson.

I feel like my responsibility as an actor is to make characters as compelling and believable as possible.

A winner is not someone who wins. It’s someone who tries and isn’t afraid to lose.

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,...

I was always inventing characters and making up stories.

This is the Bond of the new millennium. Everything is updated, from the action sequences to the interaction between the characters. All the elements reflect changes that have occurred in the world in recent years.

When I look at female characters, I want to recognize myself in them: my trials, my tribulations as a mother, as a lover, as a daughter.

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

Working on a sitcom and improv improves your comedic chops. If you do it long enough, the one thing you learn to do is listen to the other characters.

I want my characters to really overuse their coping mechanisms to the point where they break down within 300 pages.

In my early writing, all of my characters were exactly the same person. They all spoke the same, made the same types of jokes, reacted the same, etc. I think they were all just me...

The way of creating believable characters is not by conforming to a set of PC rules.

Never argue with your characters; they know themselves better than you do.

I see bits and pieces of me in all the characters in my films.

The nicest characters in ‘A Week in December’ are, in fact, Muslims – and their religious devotion is one of the things that defines them.

I’ve had the opportunity to do a wide range of stuff, a lot of different characters and they’ve all had their own kind of thing.

I’m happy being myself, which I’ve never been before. I always hid in other people, or tried to find myself through the characters, or live out their lives, but I didnt have those things in...

A person’s hope does not drop really till he could not stop to believe truly in himself.

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.

Part of the allure of watching characters on-screen is to be able to put yourself in his or her shoes or to be able to relate to what he or she is going through or...

Truth is irrelevant; what matters is what people believe.

Even in horror novels where you know most characters aren’t going to make it to the end, it’s crucial to have fully fleshed-out characters. If you don’t do that, the reader doesn’t care what happens...