Kathleen Kennedy Quotes

I think I would struggle with any job if it was purely about effects. Even as a viewer, those aren't the kind of things that interest me. I think ultimately you have to be connected to characters and their relationships. Otherwise, it's not drama to me.

Any show I'm working on, I want the stories to always be about something, and to have the potential to be emotional. That's the kind of story that I like.

I think it is important that you care about the characters, and you are not just waiting for the next action sequence but have a vested interested in what happens to them.

I don't plot my novels - I move along with my characters.

I don't think people are ever going to a place where they're like, 'I'm over stories about character and love.'

As an actor, I think a mistake that any storyteller can make is to play the ending.

I'm still really fascinated with characters and people and telling their stories.

'The Last Of Us,' to me, is just amazing storytelling, because everything's from the character point of view, which even movies don't really do successfully a lot of the time.

Besides the mistakes that are pointed out, I love the way readers become involved with the characters. When readers start asking about character motivations instead of concentrating on the special effects, it means you're connecting with them on a personal level.

My stories are character driven.

We seek to craft characters who inspire empathy: characters our audience will care for and, as a result, will care about what happens to them and thus will share the journey we have charted. A story, after all, is the character's journey.

My main problem with fiction is that once my characters get moving, you just have to follow them along and get out of the way of the story, but sometimes they pull me in too many directions, and I need to focus.

My characters are always utterly sympathetic to me, if that makes any sense.

I've never been interested in watching or reading anything because it's the hero's story. I don't feel the need to be inspired by the character or learn a lesson. I feel the need to be engaged by them.

My only conclusion about structure is that nothing works if you don't have interesting characters and a good story to tell.

You can film the most exciting car chase and the most exciting stunts, but if you don't care about the person inside the car, and you don't care about their predicament, you're not really going to care about the action, either.

Whether it's Brad Pitt up there, if there's a good moment up there, and you get pulled into the emotion, you're not thinking, 'Oh, that's Brad Pitt. He's an actor, and he's famous.' That's kind of the nature of storytelling, right? You sit around the fire and tell a story, and you can get sucked into that story.

For the longest time, I was in random cold matches for 30 minutes and tore the house down for no reason, and everyone complained, 'Why isn't he in some kind of a story?'

I think it's always good not to listen to what the rules are supposed to be about the arc of the character and the third acts and all this stuff.

Something that 'Game of Thrones' always does successfully is that action sequences are never just action sequences. There's always a point of view, and you're always identifying with one person or one group of people.

You have to be involved and relate to the characters in order to make a film that is true emotionally.

In the 'Buffy' room, it was never about a plot twist, ever. It was always about, 'Tell the story, tell the characters, complicate their lives, make things get worse,' but we never worked backwards from the plot, and it was always a great lesson.

If we get caught up in a story, it's because we've started to care about the characters, and that can only happen if we've moved beneath the surface.

Fans want to see a story with characters, and they want to see a story.

I always try to make my characters people, and yet I always want to entertain.