Michael Morpurgo Quotes

To combine telling an interesting story with brilliantly written characters is the most difficult thing to do.

When I was writing my first novel, 'Elizabeth is Missing,' I was writing the only novel I had ever written and writing about the only protagonist I'd ever written about. Because of this, I didn't think of her as a construct. Maud was real.

I don't ever really know where I get my characters from.

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.

I tend to spend a lot of time building characters that the reader will believe in and sympathize with.

I always say I write my own novels and the characters don't take control of me, but in fact, I look at the characters in the early stages and I think, 'What is he or she like,' and they slowly come together and they become the person they are.

I liked 35 and in both my novels that is the age of the lead characters. I tried making them my age but they just seemed to keep moaning about stuff.

I have tried very hard as a novelist to say, 'Novels are about individuals and especially larger than life individuals.'

That's one of those things that will really hurt me personally, if I label a character or think about what it might do if it were to do well. I just try to do a good job with it.

Most of my films have been very character driven.

I love all the characters I write.

As an author you hope your characters have sparks but truly in the end they have minds of their own!

I do want to write about Jane Whitefield again, but only when I have a good enough idea - something I've figured out about her that's news and that's worth a reader's time.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people.

I have always argued, in a good novel, interesting things happen to interesting people.

To me, characters are at the heart of great literature.

Plot and character are virtually the same thing.

You spend so much time writing a character the way I did with Buddy Baker and then Green Arrow that you start to care about them. And you almost think of them as people, you know?

The writer of stories or of novels settles on men and imitates them; he exhausts the possibilities of his characters.

All the writing elements are the same. You need to tell a good story... You've got good characters... People think there's some dramatic difference between writing 'Little Bear' and the 'Hunger Games,' and as a writer, for me, there isn't.

My books are character-driven. They're not driven by the story.

Whichever character I'm using and wherever I am in my mind dictates what kind of story I'm going to tell.

At the end of the day, it's really, really difficult to make a brand-new show, to write a pilot where you have to introduce characters and everyone has to kind of be dynamic and have something different for themselves.

A friend of mine who is in the publishing business knew I was writing a book, and he said, 'Have you said anything yet about the good guy? Because I know you spend so much time with the bad guys.' Because they're fun. So then you have to make the good guy fun, in order to compete. That's the challenge.