Mahershala Ali Quotes

Once you've established where you are, you go to the character and elaborate on expressions and action.

It always helps me connect with characters, to think about what music they respond to.

That's not the part of the story that I'm interested in, anyway. The part that I'm interested in is all the personal stuff. I tried to base the powers on family archetypes.

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

All fiction is about people, unless it's about rabbits pretending to be people. It's all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that's what we call 'the plot'.

You've got to leave the reader with more than just a name and a costume - they need to know who the character is, what they're like, what kind of attitude they have, what sort of role they play.

When you're writing a book, with people in it as opposed to animals, it is no good having people who are ordinary, because they are not going to interest your readers at all. Every writer in the world has to use the characters that have something interesting about them, and this is even more true in children's books.

I like Nirvana, but I couldn't say that I was influenced by them. I like to tell a story.

The characters are always the focal point of a book for me, whether I'm writing or reading. I may enjoy a book that has an intriguing mystery or a good plot, but to become one of my real favorites, it has to have great characters.

The goal is to have every character take on a life of his or her own. Sometimes characters will come into the story that I haven't planned.

When you find you don't like a character, you just type four letters and he's dead.

You just play what a writer writes, in terms of what a character chooses to do and how a character chooses to deal with their various relationships.

I can tell you that as a writer and as a reader, I regard character as king. Or queen. No matter how riveting the action or interesting the plot twists, if I don't feel like I'm meeting someone who feels real, I'm not going to be compelled to read further.

I'm tired of playing freaking cha-chas, the sassy CIA agent, the best friend homegirl. I'm tired of that!

I try to create characters that I am fascinated by on some level or intrigued by or can't stand.

My stories are character driven.

It's necessary to track characters all the way through an opera. If you're dealing with more than one or two characters, it's very easy to forget that the others have lives of their own that feed into the story.

Given what I do to my characters, I'm not sure I'd want to meet any of them.

What I'm really trying to do is create unique characters.

I put heavy emphasis on the characters.

Music is always a part of my characters' make-up.

I make out a play list for every character and buy the records they would listen to; it helps me find their personas. What they play, where they stay, who they lay, is my matrix for character development.

I know the relationships, and I already know my characters and how I'm going to reveal my characters to my readers - how I'm going to feed them information about that character. That stuff doesn't have to be in my outline.

All the movies I've made are essentially character-driven movies about people that I'm interested in.

Scripts that make characters a two-sentence description, I'm not interested in.