Jesmyn Ward Quotes

One of the things that separates a good genre movie from a bad genre movie, I always think, ironically, is when you care about the people. The dime a dozen ones are where you don't have any awareness of the character.

I've found I can plunge the characters into whatever absurd, awful situation, and readers will follow as long as the writer makes them seem like 'real people.'

Finding the voice of a character, no matter who it is - from Black Widow to Han Solo - is the first and most important hurdle for me to cross in any work of fiction.

I can tell very early on, reading a script, within six or seven pages, whether I'm looking at real people, and whether I can see and hear real people.

I believe that a great character can be made in one scene, or a few moments.

In terms of the pilot, you have to introduce a lot of characters in a very short period of time, and you have to paint with slightly broad brush strokes because you just need to give an audience an idea of who these people might be.

I don't like having characters as props. I never want a character to be a prop.

When you've got good writing, you can kind of give up all the research, in a way, and start just following the emotional integrity of the journey of your character.

I try to talk about things I know about. But my characters are more of a combination of people or how I imagine people would feel.

I love to evoke the bones and meat and thoughts of characters.

I think in some ways, acting and writing are the same. You're getting inside the skin of someone else; you're creating their language and their actions. As a writer, you have to see the whole picture and the structure, and you have to understand every character.

In terms of the parallels, I've never related less to a character than Riggan.

The real trick to these movies and making the big action sequences work - and I've forgotten this sometimes and screwed it up - the characters really have to be humanized. Because you can have the greatest special effects in the world, but if you don't care about the people in those effects, there's no impact.

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

I think, ultimately, if you create characters that people like and can relate to, your characters are grounded on a human level even if your cars are not.

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.

Whether it is television or film, the character on the page has to speak to me.

I came into this business to create characters that moved people and told stories.

I like to write characters that feel like people that I would know.

Definitely later on in the 'Life is Strange' season one recording, we were all pretty tuned into who these characters were. There wasn't a whole lot of finagling that needed to be done, I don't think.

I used to say I wasn't interested in writing about characters.

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.

Dialogue is the place that books are most alive and forge the most direct connection with readers. It is also where we as writers discover our characters and allow them to become real.

Outside books, we avoid colorful characters.