Amos Oz Quotes

Real people are never central characters in my works.

I'm not angry; I write about angry characters. When I'm doing that, I'm happy. Just like when I'm writing about Mickey Sabbath being lustful, I'm not feeling lustful; I'm happy.

I never set out to be the man who writes a lot of female characters.

The thought of the novelist lies not in the remarks of his characters or even in their introspection but in the plight he has invented for his characters - in the juxtaposition of those characters and in the lifelike ramifications of the ensemble they make: their density, their substantiality, their lived existence actualized in all its nuanced particulars, is in fact his thought metabolized.

One nourishes one's created characters with one's own substance: it's rather like the process of gestation. To give the character life, or to give him back life, it is of course necessary to fortify him by contributing something of one's own humanity, but it doesn't follow from that that the character is I, the writer, or that I am the character. The two entities remain distinct.

When a character is born, he acquires at once such an independence, even of his own author, that he can be imagined by everybody even in many other situations where the author never dreamed of placing him; and so he acquires for himself a meaning which the author never thought of giving him.

Plot springs from character... I've always sort of believed that these people inside me- these characters- know who they are and what they're about and what happens, and they need me to help get it down on paper because they don't type.

I'm not one of those people who as a writer lets my characters tell me what they want to do or call to me or seek me. I go seeking for things, using them as an agent, really.

The characters are telling you the story. I'm not telling you the story, they're going to do it. If I do it right, you will get the whole story.

His soul is in his stories. I once asked him who inspired him to create his characters, and his answer was no one. That all his characters were himself.

Brian is an archetypal character, a bit like Don Juan, which is how I play him. He's a blast to play. He believes unapologetically in his freedom. He holds nothing back. Something I'm learning is, you can't hate the character you play. If I think my character is an asshole, that's all that will come across. He is drawn in an extreme way, but that doesn't mean he's not a person.

I would never wish to say that I've finally waved goodbye to any character, it's just that the emphasis tends to shift.

I try to be true to the characters that I've created and sometimes I disagree with them, but their opinions about the story and the characters really matter to me.

If you're writing on your own, each character is just you. It's just you.

Since I hold no judgments against my characters, no matter how heinous they might seem, I present them as real people with their own moral centers. We might feel those moral centers are mis-calibrated, but they are there and are the rudders that propel them. This makes reading my work a visceral roller coaster, 'cause the reader must embark on the journey of the protagonist equipped only with his or her own moral center.

You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That's really the most complicated part.

It's really an organic sort of process. You start off with the character on the page. You fall in love with that character and you have to represent that character well and I think it's just an evolution there. Using the accent and speaking the lines with the accent in fact opens the door to who the character really is.

When I write, I picture the characters a certain way in my head, and they're not like any actor or actress. It's almost hard for me to let go of my ideas as to the way they look.

Sometimes I pretend not to look at my own characters, because that's like different people getting off with your girlfriend or something.

When complicated characters aren't well drawn, they're boring.

I don't think about the stories so much, as the characters themselves. They live on, and they are almost as real as I am.

Some writers, notably Anton Chekov, argue that all characters must be admirable, because once we've looked at anyone deeply enough and understood their motivation we must identify with them rather than judge them.

Y'see, I get so bored so easily. I like to start with a clean slate each time. Sure, I'll have characters drop in and out of books but the main cast of characters always changes. Maybe I'm wrong but I think if had the same joe detective guy or gal, I wouldn't write them as well; I wouldn't do as good a job.

Every actor, I don't care what they say, their roles are a lot more interesting than we are, and at the end of the day, it's still entertainment or fantasy. I think we can learn a lot from the characters we play and I find that the characters are even more noble than myself.

My characters are actually usually pretty smart and admirable.