George R. R. Martin Quotes

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.

But there's the paradox of fiction - why do you cry when a fake character dies? It's the basis of art. You engage with people who don't exist and care about them as you would your friends and relatives.

If you can't laugh at your own characters, or shed a tear for them, or even get angry at one of them, no one else will either.

If the reader cares, I don't think it matters so much whether your hero is in fact an anti-hero.

I am a firm believer that a good plot makes for a fun enough read, but it's not what binds us. If we don't care about the characters, we won't care - not in a lasting way - about what's happening to them.

The emotions triggered by fiction are very real. When Charles Dickens wrote about the death of Little Nell in the 1840s, people wept - and I'm sure that the death of characters in J.K. Rowling's 'Harry Potter' series led to similar tears.

It's hard to be scared if you don't feel for a character, because you don't care if they die or live.

I think there has to be an empathic strike between the reader and the protagonist. There has to be something said or known that connects the reader to this person you're going to ride through the story with.

You want the audience to be in the character's shoes. The more deeply into the character's shoes the audience is, the more they're going to care about what's going on.

I think it's touching that the fans feel so close to the characters that they feel personally hurt. I've felt that way in plenty of TV shows - 'Game of Thrones,' 'Mad Men.' How could they do that to that character? That's drama.

If you care about [the characters] as if they were real, that always helps.

You have to like the characters you play.

Sometimes I can't get out of the character because the story is very intense.

Stories have a special way of putting us inside the people, inside the boots of the soldiers. You're absorbed in a way a documentary or nonfiction can't do for you.

If there is any secret to my success, I think it's that my characters are very real to me. I feel everything they feel, and therefore I think my readers care about them.

As a writer, you have to realize that people want to like the characters, so you have to be careful to keep them involved.

The idea that people in novels should be more sympathetic than people in life simply baffles me.

The first thing, when I read the script, is that I need to care about what happens and feel compelled by the story and engaged by the characters. It needs to resonate with me, even if what the characters are going through is not something that I have experienced in my life. I have to feel like it has some sort of meaning to me.

I think the key is to give the reader characters they not only care about, but identify with, and to never take away all hope.

If you remain unsettled by a piece of writing, it means you are not watching the story from the outside; you've already taken a step towards it.

Part of the success of the show is that the audience sees themselves in the characters, becomes the characters. The more they inhabit the characters, the more they see.

I don't have any training as an actor, but I guess I'm an intense pretender. When you read something over and over, it gets into you a little bit. You can't help but begin to feel it, even if you're a healthy person as I think I am.

I like when you watch a film and you feel like you're a part of somebody's life for an hour and a half.

If you don't care for the villain, if you don't love him and hate him at the same time, then he's just boring.

There has to be something that I like about a character for me to be able to play him.