David McCullough Quotes

I usually start with a repulsive character and go on from there.

Plot makes the character just as history makes the man.

For me, one thing I love is having an arc for a character.

If you have great characters, then your reader becomes emotionally invested in those people.

Every character comes with its own challenges.

I'd love to do a film. I'd love to play a character that I know the beginning, middle and end of.

I've often said the reader knows every bit as much about Thorne as I do. When I created him for 'Sleepyhead,' I was determined he should be a character who would develop, book by book, change and grow as we all do, and who - crucially - would be unpredictable.

One pleasure of working on a trilogy is watching characters warp and grow over time.

I enjoy pushing my characters to the limit. No matter how far out there I go, I look for things that make the characters human.

After a while, the character sort of took over.

I tend to come up with people more than situations - most of my books start with a character.

A lot of times, scripts are written so the character is all one way. Even with 'Bringing Out the Dead,' the character was written a little more generic.

Sometimes I know what my characters are moving away from or toward; more often I just wait and see. For instance, though I knew Sinkler in 'The Trusty' was going for water, I did not know that he would meet a fetching young farm wife until I got him into her front yard.

I wanted more in depth ideas about the character and it never came.

I think action should be revealed through character, so if you have a plot problem, it's probably a character problem.

When you can have a character that the audience likes from the beginning, but then you put them in a situation where they grow - I think that gives it a lot of heart.

I like to take a character and develop it.

Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it's necessary for the characters to change.

Coming from TV and film, rule number one is that you always service the main character first and foremost. If that's not working, you've got nothing.

Developing characters is a strange thing. In the beginning they are abstract and I wonder how to move on from there.

Often the starting point for characters, for me, is finding a little, most minor detail, and I'll go from there.

When you create a character, you create it for yourself - you do whatever you want. It's your job to explore it in as many different avenues as you can in order to make it a fully wounded character.

In creating a new character, it's sometimes difficult to find a touchstone, a North Star that will always point you in the direction that character will travel.

I build my characters from the day they're born to the first page of the script.

Rather than just making a movie about video games, I wanted to start with the character and what the character was going through.