Etgar Keret Quotes

My characters surprise me constantly. My characters are like my friends - I can give them advice, but they don't have to take it. If your characters are real, then they surprise you, just like real people.

The main characters for 'The Seer and the Sword' made an appearance one night and then haunted me for over five years before I began to write them down. Does that count as inspiration? For me, characters tend to show up, stay on to help with the work of writing their stories, and then occasionally deign to visit after a book is finished.

When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him.

In a way, the characters often do take over.

Plot makes the character just as history makes the man.

Although a novel takes place in the larger world, there's always some drive in it that is entirely personal - even if you don't know it while you're doing it.

I don't use recurring characters. I do get very interested in my characters while I'm working with them, and I find the process of fitting them into a story, and allowing them to create the story around themselves, fascinating. But no, I don't imagine they have a life outside of what I make for them.

Filmmaking is always sort of building a mosaic of this arc of what the character is going through.

Characters develop as the book progresses, but any that start to bore me end up in the wastepaper basket. In real life, we may have to put up with tedious people, but not in novels.

I really fall in love with my characters, even the bad ones. I love getting together with them. They tell me what to do; they take me on a wild and wonderful trip.

For me, one thing I love is having an arc for a character.

When I read a script or I see a character, I don't necessarily see the arc of her, that by the end she is this person, she's different from she was in the beginning. I guess it's more a subconscious understanding of that arc.

As an author you hope your characters have sparks but truly in the end they have minds of their own!

All fiction is about people, unless it's about rabbits pretending to be people. It's all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that's what we call 'the plot'.

There are two different forms of storytelling: Novels tend to come from the inside of a character, and movies tend to look at them from the outside in relation to others in their world.

One pleasure of working on a trilogy is watching characters warp and grow over time.

My books usually end where they began. I try to bring characters back to a point that is familiar but different because of the growth that they have gone through.

In the old days, I just could not leave characters alone. Now I just try to keep the ones that still have something in the way of stories to tell.

Every single film I've done, it's about the character.

After a while, the character sort of took over.

In the writers' room, when we talk about each episode, we first talk about the character journey of the episode.

For the most part, my characters don't talk to me. I like to lord over them like some kind of benevolent deity. And, for the most part, my characters go along with it. I write intense character sketches and long, play-like conversations between me and them, but they stay out of the book writing itself.

The stories that I like to tell and the movies I like are always grounded in the emotional arc of the characters.

Any author of fiction will tell you that characters don't need to be told what to do.

The characters do have a life of their own; it's weird.