Garry Trudeau Quotes

There was no difference between my characters and the life my readers were going to have to face.

I couldn't tell you a good, bad or ugly pilot just from reading it, but I can tell you a character I want to play.

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

You never want to be in a position where your reader feels like you're passing judgment on your own characters. Any novel where you feel like the author is talking to the reader over the characters' heads is in a bad place.

You put books out into the world, and people form their own visuals and images and attachments to characters; those characters become part of them, and they have their feelings about them.

As a writer, you have to realize that people want to like the characters, so you have to be careful to keep them involved.

I become my characters, and then try to allow events in the story to take their own course. I try not to play God, but to let them work out their own destiny.

An author's characters do what he wants them to do.

Big stories need human stakes.

'Drown' was always a hybrid book. It's connected stories - partially a story collection but partially a novel. I always wanted the reader to decide which genre they thought the book belonged to more - story, novel, neither, both.

You can't visit readers where you think they are. You have to invite them home to where you are and try to lure them into your universe. That's the art of storytelling.

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.

I've always enjoyed that kind of thing - thinking about the production of narrative and why it is that when we read a novel, we don't notice the fact that someone who might be very close-mouthed or tight-lipped is perfectly willing to tell us a story in 600 or 700 pages.

We give you characters we'd feel very comfortable judging, and then go: 'Oh yeah? Watch this'.

I think for anybody reading the book they're going to get an idea in their heads of all those characters, and I think that once that gets fixed, it's quite hard to shake.

The one thing you have to do if you write a book is put yourself in someone else's shoes. The reader's shoes. You've got to entertain them.

Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

The easiest way for readers to connect with characters and feel sympathy is to make the character entertaining, sympathetic and likeable.

Any character that can't be kept straight, to me, isn't a character who should be in the book - you know, anyone not vivid enough to have a claim on my attention.

The bottom line always remains the same: What is the basic humanity of the character? How do I make them resonate with the reader?

What I find frustrating about scripted television is that it's rare that you are surprised by how you feel about the character, or how you feel about the show.

If there is no love between the author and the story, there is no love between the reader and the story.

I don't necessarily believe that stories need closure. I just believe they need a beginning, middle, and end, but the end doesn't have to prevent us from continuing to grapple with the story at hand. It ideally should demand that we remain engaged with the story.

If the reader doesn't care or relate to the characters, all that visual spectacle is pretty but feels empty.

This is the beauty of fiction. We may not like these characters, but we inhabit them.