Anita Desai Quotes

Normally when I'm sent a script I'll read it through to see how it hangs as a story and then I'll go back and read it through again and look at the character.

I've always loved shows that combine both approaches - that have a mythology and a set of characters, whose stories develop and change, and where the relationships evolve and fracture.

It's necessary to track characters all the way through an opera. If you're dealing with more than one or two characters, it's very easy to forget that the others have lives of their own that feed into the story.

The idea of having different characters is really just to get the storyline across, you know? Coming from one particular character makes, to me, the story boring. I get that mainly from novels and that style of writing or movies where there's multiple characters who carry the storyline.

Great novels have great characterization no matter what. But multiple points of view let me examine characters from entirely different perspectives, allowing me to learn more about everyone in the process.

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'.

My books are character-driven. They're not driven by the story.

I think I would struggle with any job if it was purely about effects. Even as a viewer, those aren't the kind of things that interest me. I think ultimately you have to be connected to characters and their relationships. Otherwise, it's not drama to me.

I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.

But I also wanted to give them an intelligent emotional journey, without having to suspend reality - to be able to look at those characters and see reasons for the relationships and why what happens happens.

It's really about, oh come on, this guy wouldn't say that or he wouldn't do that, you know, it's about the characters, about the story, about the situation.

It's exciting that you've got an entire season to experience 24 hours of highly dramatically charged human experience. It allows for the close inspection of minutiae in behaviour.

'Push' had a story, 'The Paperboy' story you could just throw up in the air and shoot holes through the book because the story wasn't as strong. But I felt the characters were stronger in 'The Paperboy'; they were vivid.

The best shows are always the ones that are very, very low-concept and just about great characters.

Stories are great, but at the end of the day, you remember that moment and that moment and that moment. 'The Avengers' had all of this great, giant action, but for all of the clever dialogue, it's the moments.

My stories are character driven.

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.

All topics, issues, and subjects in 'The Room' add to the depth of the characters in the movie, and they are equally important.

My main problem with fiction is that once my characters get moving, you just have to follow them along and get out of the way of the story, but sometimes they pull me in too many directions, and I need to focus.

Any important series like 'Game of Thrones' or 'The Walking Dead' base their product around the characters and their background.

Smart writers really take their time in investing in backstories and characters. As a viewer, you have to invest in them and love them before you can chip away at what's going on more on a deeper level with secondary characters.

Something that 'Game of Thrones' always does successfully is that action sequences are never just action sequences. There's always a point of view, and you're always identifying with one person or one group of people.

In 'Poster Boys,' every character is well defined.

In the 'Buffy' room, it was never about a plot twist, ever. It was always about, 'Tell the story, tell the characters, complicate their lives, make things get worse,' but we never worked backwards from the plot, and it was always a great lesson.

To combine telling an interesting story with brilliantly written characters is the most difficult thing to do.