Thomas Pynchon Quotes

What I need, as a reader, is a character with a heart and a voice and a pulse. I need a character so vivid and so specific that she doesn't feel like fiction.

The characters are whole, real people to me that I'm getting to know, and since real people are all flawed, so are my characters, I hope.

Readers embrace all kinds of characters as long as they are written with emotional truth.

To make a book convincing, it's less important that the right tree be in the right place than that the characters are emotionally real.

I don't worry about whether a character is likable, as long as the character is believable.

When the characters are believable and endearing, action scenes, for example, make an impact. Otherwise, the audience gets no kick out of action. The biggest strength of 'MCA' is that its characters are real.

If a writer is true to his characters they will give him his plot. Observations must play second fiddle to integrity.

I believe in characters that can be tangible, and that you can actually relate to.

Comedy and drama are different sides of the same coin. And the thing about comedy and drama is about likability. It's about character first. It's about story. And for me, it's about empathy, and I think the realer someone is, the further you can go either way with them.

You try to make characters you care about, and I think realism helps. Even though this is a high concept, the characters have got to be real.

Until a character becomes a personality it cannot be believed.

I enjoy bringing humanity to complex characters.

I don't think an actor needs to necessarily go through his things to do his job. I think it's way more important to imagine. And then, when you're imagining, your experiences, your images and your own personal things will show up, but you keep imagining. You don't get stuck in your own personal things, otherwise you are telling your story in every character, and that's not interesting for anybody.

When we approached the project, the very first thing we did was take each character and say, "Okay, where would this character be?" We didn't want them to be caricatures of themselves. We wanted them to live and breathe, and grow with the audience and with us.

Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page.

Fiction, at its best, is a radical act of intimacy. It seeks to join, to merge, to know deeply; and, as with intimacy, there is a way in which it cannot be faked.

They've turned this character into a human being.

Everybody claims they have relatable, connectable characters, but those claims often aren't true.

If you can't laugh at your own characters, or shed a tear for them, or even get angry at one of them, no one else will either.

Every reader knows about the feeling that characters in books seem more real than real people.

I don't really approach stories to make them different from other stuff I've seen, I just try to get into the character, into his or her head. Try to make it as funny, as scary or as wild as I can so that I really like it.

I've always believed in populating my films with characters who we like, who we have some warmth for, who have warmth for each other, who we would like to hang out with, who we emulate in one way or another.

At the core, I try to write characters who are real people with real insecurities, fears, hopes, and dreams, which is why hopefully readers can identify with them.

And the most important thing - apart from telling a good, believable story, and being a true character - is to be someone the audience will care about, even if you're playing a murderer or rapist.

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.