Emily Giffin Quotes

We're all flawed, and we all make mistakes, and we all have weaknesses. And those are the kind of people I want to see onscreen, the ones that feel like real flesh-and-blood human beings and not the weird, whitewashed, Hollywood stand-ins for people with the rough edges sanded off that I can't connect to because they just don't resonate with me.

The characters are whole, real people to me that I'm getting to know, and since real people are all flawed, so are my characters, I hope.

You don't want to play a perfect person; no one cares about that.

I love flawed characters, male or female, and I only want to talk about flawed characters, really, in what I do.

I'm very drawn to characters who are very flawed. I'm less interested in characters who are just good or bad, because to me then they're not real people.

I think heroes who are not flawed are not believable.

All my characters are quite relatable, as they are flawed, true, and honest. All of us are flawed; nobody is pure and pious.

I love to feature children and young adults as real people - flawed, naive, virtuous, venal - but real. I think it adds nuance and depth to the stories that wouldn't exist without them.

I don't like to play characters that are too perfect.

Perfect heroes are cool, but no one can really empathize or identify with them.

All of my characters are less than perfect.

The characters I've always been drawn to are real and flawed. That's not how women have always been portrayed.

Female characters in literature are full. They're messy: they've got runny noses and burp and belch. Unfortunately, in film, female characters don't often have that kind of richness.

Fallible characters are more interesting than superheroes in the end.

It's very hard to play a man without any flaws.

There's this thing in Hollywood about the sympathetic character and likability. I've never understood that because the people I love most in my life are not likable all the time. My wife is not always likable. I'm certainly not always likable. My dad is not always likable. We're human beings.

I let characters be human and flawed and relatable.

I don't want to watch a show or a movie about the guy who doesn't have any problems, who is sort of a goodie two shoes and just does everything morally right, because that's not the person I relate to. That's not who I am. That's not what anyone is.

We like flawed people.

I think it would be very boring dramatically to have a film where everybody was a lawyer or doctor and had no faults. To me, the most important thing is to be truthful.

To recognize yourself in a character onscreen, and to connect with them, you gotta recognize their flaws; they gotta feel like a real person.

I think we love watching people that are flawed because we're all flawed.

To me the interesting main character is never the one without flaws.

There's no such thing as a perfect person, so it makes no sense to write a perfect person. I don't know any author who'd try. And we write characters, not representations of groups.

I don't want a perfect character, I want a character who has, as strange as it sounds, some humanity, some flaws, some needs.