Stan Lee Quotes

You try to make characters you care about, and I think realism helps. Even though this is a high concept, the characters have got to be real.

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

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.

I have no idea and I think Steven King strongest suit is the characters that he does create, all in the same area where he lives. The way he describes them is one of his fortes and it boggles my mind how he's able to do that and to create so many. It must be thousands by now.

Once you have your character sitting right there in your head, all you really need to do is wind them up, put them down, and simply write down what they do, say, or think.

Literary characters, like my grandmother's apparitions, are fragile beings, easily frightened; they must be treated with care so they will feel comfortable in my pages

I love... What's gratifying to me is when you make/create a character and a human being, a person who lives entirely and who has their own existence, just merely from the words on a page.

I suppose it's possible that a writer would have feeling for his characters, but I can't see how, because writing is such a meticulous, intricate, technical business. I wish I could say that I love my characters and that frequently they take over the book and run away with the plot and so on. But they don't exist.

I just want to tell a good story, so I always ask myself, 'Are these people real to me?'

Everybody claims they have relatable, connectable characters, but those claims often aren't true.

You treat characters like people you meet in life-friends or mentors.

I treat all my characters as if they were real, and I am scrupulous about the details of their lives.

What's the difference between Hollywood characters and my characters? Mine are real.

I always talk about my characters like they're real people.

You need the audience to become invested in the characters and in order to become invested, they need to identify with the characters... and that's why the characters need to be real.

When I write, I try to become different characters.

You really have to do your job as a writer and push people to be as creative as possible. What's nice about the TV medium is you have such a connection to the characters that when somebody dies, the audience cries. They really feel it. You really don't cry when someone dies in a horror movie.

I don't judge my characters, and that's my job not to judge them.

When I'm writing novels, even screenplays, it's never an actor I have in mind; it's always the version in my head of who the character is. Once somebody gets cast, I have to adjust a little bit to who they are.

I write about relationships and I try to create real-life characters.

I think "honest" sometimes gets used to describe a real depiction of real life. I don't think that's necessarily what we're doing. We created these fake characters and we're just trying to figure out what they would do in situations they enter into.

I don't think you can teach someone how to come up with good characters or a story.

In a story, for example, you'll start off with a character who is a little bit of a cartoon. That's not satisfying and you start revising. And as you revise you always are making it better by being specific and by observing more closely, which actually is really the same as saying you love your characters. The close observation equals love of them.

Writers are magpies, and we collect details about people and we use them for fictional characters.

Character, I think, is the single most important thing in fiction. You might read a book once for its interesting plot—but not twice.