Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

I think every character is important in every film - be it small, primary, or lead - because they are adding something to the story, taking it forward.

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

You know it's my job to visualize, what is literal or audible, so I designed all the characters, and I designed what they do and how they should do it and so on.

Characters develop as the book progresses, but any that start to bore me end up in the wastepaper basket. In real life, we may have to put up with tedious people, but not in novels.

But keep characters in propinquity long enough and a story will always develop a plot.

In what we think of as bad dialogue, the characters talk directly to each other.

Narrative and characters have always interested me. I never tried to alienate an audience. Of course, gradually, I wanted a bigger and bigger space to draw people in, so it's very organic [growth].

I do just love the characters in sci-fi, but not necessarily the fact that it's sci-fi.

Let your characters talk to each other and do things. Spend time with them - they'll tell you who they are and what they're up to.

Every story starts with an idea, but it is the characters that move this idea forward.

I usually start with something that has some energy, like a compressed character or a situation that's wound up like a spring. Then all I have to do is let it go, let its energy carry the story. And that may not turn out to be the beginning of the book.

I learned a lesson that I keep learning over and over, and that is that the most fun is to watch our main characters interact with each other. The most fun comes from their tight interaction.

You can't have a movie with a group of people that are significant players in the story, that push forward the plot, without introducing at least one or two of them.

I think the more depth you build into the characters, and the more you see where they came from, the more fun you can have. Setting up different characters in different relationships is always helpful as you move forward.

Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving towards the watcher on the shore.

Any time two characters are talking about a third, the scene is a crock of s***.

When you're in sync with the director, on the type of movie you want to make, the arc of the characters, how the characters intertwine and interact, plotlines and story, and things like that, it really makes a difference.

One of the joys of this show [Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency] is that each of those characters could be starring in their own show. It's only as the show goes on that you realize how they interconnect. They're all moving towards one another inexorably, to meet at a certain point.

It depends on the story and the filmmaker. And it depends on the character, and the heart and soul of the person that I see on the page, and if it resonates with something that I think I can summon in myself.

I very much write from characters. Those people start speaking, and then I have them in the house with me and I live with them. Then at some point, it's time to get them out of the house. You can only live with someone like Dr. Georgeous Teitelbaum from THE SISTERS ROSENSWEIG for so long, and then it's time for her to go. But it is very like having the company of these people and trying to craft them in some way into a story.

Each piece of dialogue MUST be "something happening". . .The "amusing" for its OWN sake should above all be censored. . .The functional use of dialogue for the plot must be the first thing in the writer's mind. Where functional usefulness cannot be established, dialogue must be left out.

When your characters are really living they tell you what they do.

There's not a lot of direct back story but you do get to see them playing around each other a lot.

Every issue, the characters and I duke it out. They usually win.

It's not as if the stories merge to a point where you think they are your life, but you do let them in the front door and the back door, and it's okay that sometimes certain characters stay for dinner.