John Allison Quotes

I've always had difficulties with female characters.

I have this theory that the likeability question comes up so much more with female characters created by female authors than it does with male characters and male authors.

I like my male characters as much my female characters, but I always seem to have less for them to say.

In an ideal world, we would be able to just swap characters' genders around because I don't ever wake up in the morning and think to myself, 'Oh I am such a woman today,' because that is just so ridiculous.

As a woman, I don't feel like I have a responsibility to create better female characters. I feel like I have a responsibility to create good characters. Because the truth is, those kinds of things ghettoize us even more as writers.

I should have asked for credit - but he has no idea how amazing it is that a character that was written as a boy can be equally written for a girl. It's like you said, just write a character as if it were a man, and then turn it and make it into a woman. It's like, we're human beings, after all.

I don't write about too many male businessmen, and I'm not apt to write about too many female businessmen.

An awful lot of thriller writers write women rather badly. So just doing it OK gets a lot of credit.

I create women characters by watching the female staff at my studio. Half the staff are women.

I always find it amazing that people get mad because they can't figure out my gender. Even though my only job here is to create art, I think being a genderless figure... it shakes people. And when that happens, it makes me feel like I'm doing my job.

I think there are more female characters in videogames now but I also think that's because videogames in general are more diverse now.

I write characters. Some of those characters are women.

Part of the problem is that many directors treat female characters too often as precious. Or they want to live in a fantasy world where they just do spinning hook kicks and knock out guys who are six foot four, and that doesn't work either.

Male playwrights, on the whole, are probably more interested in male characters. They need women characters to be the women in their lives or to be the domestic difficulty.

I get the feeling that characters are written female when they have to be, and all the other characters are male, and it doesn't occur to somebody that the lawyer, the best friend, the landlord, whoever, can be female.

When we create female characters, I think often there is a tendency to kind of make female characters emotionally bulletproof.

I am glad that people have become more accepting of female characters.

I think the world is kind of catching on that gender roles aren't so necessary and becoming a lot less defined and starting to become a lot more about the individual and character of that person.

All writers are battling and fighting as to how a woman should be characterised.

Very often, as an actress, there's some kind of stereotype, but with any good script, you should be able to swap the genders of all the characters, and it shouldn't make a huge difference.

Just like how male actors get to play varied characters, I would also like to play characters that people don't normally see female characters portraying on screen.

There always has to be a coming out. There's never just a gender-nonconforming person who exists on a TV show without some screaming on-the-street moment.

I feel like it's too easy to just say, "We'll just change the name of this male character to a female, but have her do all the same things that a male does." I don't believe in that. I think there's something else. I think there's more to women than that.

There are three classes of human beings: men, women and women physicians.

I like that Helen Mirren has been saying the next doctor should be a woman. I would like to go on record and say that the Queen should be played by a man!