Claire Messud Quotes

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

Plot and character are virtually the same thing.

Whenever I approach any character, I try to find examples to draw upon.

In 'There Will Be Blood,' my character was someone who was an actor himself almost. He had a rehearsed quality about him. He was a performance artist in a way.

I honestly don't think Peter is that interesting without Harriet - the only exception being 'The Nine Tailors', which is such a good book it doesn't really matter whether he's got a consort or not.

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

I think one of the few faults in Dickens is that mostly his lead characters are blanks - who is David Copperfield, who is Oliver Twist? And yet he takes such joy in populating the rest of his novels with these fantastic, grotesque people like Pecksmith and so on.

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

I'm more interested in character than events. I've observed that about myself as a writer. I find events, even the most dramatic sort, not to be such fertile ground.

The analysis of character is the highest human entertainment.

In 'Me Before You,' the two characters popped into my head fully formed, which is really strange and unusual. Other books, I sit on them for two or three months. I have a whole routine: I buy a nice book; I hand-write all their characteristics. I put them through little tests just to see how they would react to things.

There's a bizarre insistence on how a story should be. 'The protagonist must be sympathetic!' they say. Whatever that means. I never engage in that discussion. I never use that word, 'sympathetic.' I just know 'interesting.'

Don't start writing your novel until you know your characters very, very well. What they'd do if they saw somebody shoplifting. What they were like at school. What shoes they wear. Spend days - weeks, months - being them until they thicken up and start to breathe.

The truth is, everything ultimately comes down to the relationship between the reader and the writer and the characters. Does or does not a character address moral being in a universal and important way? If it does, then it's literature.

When it comes to films, people often don't differentiate between the message of a bad central character and the message of the film itself. They are two separate things.

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.

The thing about the classics it that they are such great characters, they have a great deal of depth and different layers to them. I always find that very stimulating to play.

Whenever people say they didn't like the main character of a book, they mean they didn't like the book. The main character has to be a friend? I don't get that.

Literary fiction - if we must use the term - is not the plotless, meandering indulgence that its detractors would have you believe.

I try to begin with a strong grasp of my characters. Even if it's schematic, I need it clear in my head who these people are.

A character who is thought-out is not born, he or she is contrived. A born character is round, a thought-out character is flat.

I would say what Mad Men has taught me has been a super elevated evaluation of text in general, and understanding subtext, and understanding where a character comes from - what he means by this or by that.

'Push' had a story, 'The Paperboy' story you could just throw up in the air and shoot holes through the book because the story wasn't as strong. But I felt the characters were stronger in 'The Paperboy'; they were vivid.

What I've tended to do is to use my own experiences to get into someone else's mind, like in Wuthering Heights.

You spend so much time developing a character when you do a film; so much of your work is done before you get set to shoot because you've been working on the character: the way he walks, the way he talks, what might upset him, what might make him happy.