Jonathan Nolan Quotes

I try to trace the connection between the characters and that way a story or plot emerges.

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.

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

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.

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

Not all series books are sagas. Some are shaped more like beads on a string, separate episodes held together by a set of characters, who may or may not grow and change as the series continues.

'Homeland' really is one of those shows where they start to write more or less depending on what's kind of going on in a relationship between characters.

Characters are incredibly important, but I tend to build them around the plot during the outline stage. However, once I'm writing the manuscript, the characters I'm writing dictate how the plot unfolds.

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.

I always look for interesting, complex characters. You know, interesting, well-written material.

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.

I think it's refreshing to have a character-driven 'Batman' story that isn't just about action and getting out of scrapes.

It's nice to see different dimensions of a character. A love interest and family life are always, I think, important in creating layers and textures.

At 'OITNB,' we really work to keep to the formula that's made this show so popular with everyone who watches it, which is to have really good characters and really interesting stories.

In film, because you know where the ending is, characters can change, but in television, you substitute revelation for change, and that can be hard to pull off.

I love seeing a story evolve over several books and watching characters develop.

Every film you're commissioned to write is all about an arc; usually, the arc is that the world creates a change in the character, usually for the better. To not have an arc, the messages and ideas in the film became more prominent.

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'.

Whether you're writing a horror show or a James Bond film, I think what bubbles beneath is interesting characterization. The colors that emerge through storytelling is what a dramatist does. There's always got to be something bubbling underneath that will erupt at some point.

As a novelist, I'm endlessly fascinated by human behavior and interactions.

If you know exactly what your character knows, it's a drama.

You treat characters like people you meet in life-friends or mentors.

It's people politics, people dynamics that make a show really good, whether it's 'Desperate Housewives' or 'Lost' or 'The Sopranos.' It's the people we've grown to love or otherwise.

I think everybody goes through changes, and the same should be said for fictional characters, especially ones that you follow on television.