Richard Russo Quotes

If I don't fall in love with my characters, I cannot shoot.

My characters are always utterly sympathetic to me, if that makes any sense.

I seem to have to make my characters family before I can access their hearts in any way that matters.

I am a firm believer that a good plot makes for a fun enough read, but it's not what binds us. If we don't care about the characters, we won't care - not in a lasting way - about what's happening to them.

The question of likability is a bit of a puzzler for me. You know, I don't write people with likability in mind. It's more whether or not I find them compelling.

I've always felt, even with sketches, that if you don't care about these people, then it doesn't matter.

To get a connection to your characters, you have to put them in a situation that you can feel yourself.

One of the things that happens when you write characters - and maybe this is my own sentimentality - is that I always find I have an instinct to protect them.

I try to create characters people want to sit with, even if nothing is happening.

If we get caught up in a story, it's because we've started to care about the characters, and that can only happen if we've moved beneath the surface.

I always try to make my characters people, and yet I always want to entertain.

How I work is I work from of very character-driven place. And I trust the writers.

If there is any secret to my success, I think it's that my characters are very real to me. I feel everything they feel, and therefore I think my readers care about them.

I always believed in my characters. I lived them.

The great thing about writing is that you always put yourself in the shoes of the character. If you're doing it right, you can see into the heart of all your characters. Usually, when there's a writing problem, it's because you aren't doing that.

I enjoy the writing process and producing; I enjoy seeing an idea come to fruition. I'm driven by very complex characters. You look at the pilot of 'Breaking Bad,' where there's so much depth to the character, you can't help but be invested when you watch.

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.'

Never argue with your characters; they know themselves better than you do.

I spend a lot of time with my characters.

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 tend to write one character at a time. But I don't write the entirety of one character at a time.

So I work hard to present the human side of my characters while not neglecting the plot.

I'd like to think I'm not quite so pretentious as to think my characters go off and live their lives once I've written the final page and switched the computer off.

We don't experience our lives as plots. If I asked you to tell me what your last week was like, you're not really gonna give me plot. You're gonna give me sort of linked narrative. And I wanted to see how do we bring that into fiction without losing the reader.

I'm focused on finding characters I connect to.