Orhan Pamuk Quotes

You can take any one of our stories that we use right now, put western clothes on us, stick us out in the west and they'll work just as well - any single one of them - because they're stories about people, they're stories about things.

I often have scripts sent to me with allegedly Scottish characters where I end up telling them, 'You're going to have to rethink this whole thing!'

I need to have some depth in my characters. That's why they are all Bengalis. I can't imagine writing a book with someone called Saxena as the hero.

I try to represent specific experiences of specific characters, and that's all I want to try to do. I don't ever try to think about representing a culture, because its impossible, and someone will fault you. And it just doesn't interest me.

When I saw the 'Geronimo' script and was offered the part, it was overwhelming in that it brought back all of those feelings - made me feel what it's like to be in those shoes, the same shoes Geronimo himself might have been in.

When we started on 'Power,' I was committed to respecting the differences among Spanish dialects: Dominican, Nuyorican, Mexican, etc. I wanted the language our characters spoke to be as specific as possible, to reflect New York as it is.

The audience in the country has evolved, and for them, it is about real characters.

There's very few shows that truly reflect specific ethnic experiences, and when they come and come right, they're a hit.

With Erin [from Paper Girls], I wanted to show what she might look like when she's 40, and I wanted it to feel authentic. In terms of inspiration I ended up using my wife for a lot of it. Just to kind of to give me almost an anchor so that I would be invested in making this character real.

The loss of the culture is one of the main reasons Ciro Guerra wanted to tell their story.

The characters created cannot just be a mouthpiece for the writer. When you look at a piece of writing, and it's genuine and it doesn't feel like every character is just a mouthpiece for the writer, but that they've been created in such a way that they're expressing an idea that a writer wants to get across, that's when a story succeeds.

I want to be remembered as someone who tried to bring the story of our ancestors to the broadest possible audience. I want to be remembered as a man who loved his race.

I think you can't go into any story-breaking process thinking, 'What if they come off as unlikeable?' You just gotta break the story because if you know who your character is, the story will tell you. The story will dictate and say, "This feels off-kilter for this particular person."

I think it's hard for an outsider to capture the flavor of a community and all its nuances, so ultimately Haitian-Americans need to start sharing intimate accounts of their stories.

That's been my main interest for the last 15 years, is to really make sure the story and the characters take precedence over everything else, and that I give them everything I can to make them exist as actual people.

Eduardo Halfon is a brilliant storyteller, whose gifts are displayed on every page of this beautiful, daring, and deeply humane book.

I feel responsible to my people to portray them the way we should be.

Also, worldbuilding touches all aspects of your story. It touches plot and character as well. If you don't know the culture your character comes from, how can you know what he's really like? You must know your characters on a much deeper level than you would if you just shrugged your way into a cookie cutter fantasy world.

There's no reason why you can't say "August Wilson, playwright" even though all of my work, every single play, is about black Americans, about black American culture, about the black experience in America. I write about the black experience of men, or I write about black folks. That's who I am. In the same manner that Chekhov wrote about the Russians, I write about blacks. I couldn't do anything else. I wouldn't do anything else.

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

As in the case of many of the stories that I've written I'm not trying to editorialize. I don't want there to be a message at the end of anything I write. Otherwise you wouldn't trust the characters. They'd feel less organic and more like puppets that are sharing the author's opinion.

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

Without thinking too much about it in specific terms, I was showing the America I knew and observed to others who might not have noticed. My fundamental purpose is to interpret the typical American. I am a story teller.

Get too conceptual, too cute and remote, and your characters die on the page.

A character on a page has to feel real, and for me the greatest fun is if you could gender-swap the role.