Kathleen Kennedy Quotes

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

I always try to make my characters people, and yet I always want to entertain.

Plot and character are virtually the same thing.

I have to have a character worth caring about. I tend not to start writing books about people I don't have a lot of sympathy for because I'm just going to be with them too long.

I enjoy the writing process and producing; I enjoy seeing an idea come to fruition. I'm driven by very complex characters. You look at the pilot of 'Breaking Bad,' where there's so much depth to the character, you can't help but be invested when you watch.

Well, I must tell you I write the scripts very close to the bone. So I'm writing episode seven now and couldn't tell you what happens in episode eight.

One of the reasons I started working at 'South Park,' actually, was that I wanted to learn how to structure things and how to tell a story.

Sometimes that's a year, sometimes it's 18 months, where all I'm doing is taking notes. I'm reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is.

I tend to write one character at a time. But I don't write the entirety of one character at a time.

So I work hard to present the human side of my characters while not neglecting the plot.

That's one of those things that will really hurt me personally, if I label a character or think about what it might do if it were to do well. I just try to do a good job with it.

When you write a song like 'Forrest Gump,' the subject can't be androgynous. It requires an unnecessary amount of effort.

It always comes down to script and characters.

Really good books need a chaos element: something weird or inexplicable.

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.

The writer of stories or of novels settles on men and imitates them; he exhausts the possibilities of his characters.

I prefer to bring these to the service of story rather than to let them replace narrative.

Whichever character I'm using and wherever I am in my mind dictates what kind of story I'm going to tell.

At the end of the day, it's really, really difficult to make a brand-new show, to write a pilot where you have to introduce characters and everyone has to kind of be dynamic and have something different for themselves.

I'm more interested in character than events. I've observed that about myself as a writer. I find events, even the most dramatic sort, not to be such fertile ground.

I usually don't find myself reacting to my characters. I just create them ... And let the audience decide whether they're empathetic or scared or compelled to cheer me on.

Over the years, a number of people have asked me why I tend to write at this great length. I've put some thought into the answer, and it can be boiled down one word: consequences. Well, maybe two words: consequences and characters. Or perhaps, consequences, characters, and the subconscious mind - above all the subconscious mind.

The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him.

I don't always write in order, so composing multi-book stories could get complicated.

If I can tell you the story from beginning to end in five minutes, I'm ready to start writing. Then it's a constant spreading out of that five minutes.