Joseph Gordon-Levitt Quotes

My first job is to write the characters as full and authentic people as well as I can.

The way of creating believable characters is not by conforming to a set of PC rules.

There's a bizarre insistence on how a story should be. 'The protagonist must be sympathetic!' they say. Whatever that means. I never engage in that discussion. I never use that word, 'sympathetic.' I just know 'interesting.'

I try to ground most of my characters in reality somehow. That's kind of what I bring to the table.

I love making characters real and believable, through my own experience and choices.

My characters are not plastic.

I always try to write about believable people.

You need the audience to become invested in the characters and in order to become invested, they need to identify with the characters... and that's why the characters need to be real.

Every character, if fleshed out properly, is being taken seriously.

The thing with videogame characters is that they tend to be really undercooked, and people don't take the time to really flesh them out. They don't treat them with the respect that a writer writing characters in any other medium would treat their character.

What makes characters real are details, and if you're crafting a person from scratch, you're probably not going to pay as much attention to a question like, 'Does this person bite their nails?'

It's hard to know whether certain characters come to life or not, they either come to have their own life or they don't. I've written many things in which the characters just remain inert.

I treat all my characters as if they were real, and I am scrupulous about the details of their lives.

I do not choose characters because I think, 'Wow, that woman is so strong.' I chose these characters with utmost conviction because I think they were realistic enough to exist, and I really liked the scripts.

I've always wanted my characters to have more dimension and realistic cores than the ingenue material often provides. It's been a challenge.

All the great writers root their characters in true human behaviour.

You really have to create everything in order to come away with a full human being on screen.

I'm not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view.

I don't worry about whether a character is likable, as long as the character is believable.

It's your job to come up with compelling characters who speak to an individual authenticity. If I'm not interested in the characters, I can't go on. I have to be fascinated by them.

I can tell you that as a writer and as a reader, I regard character as king. Or queen. No matter how riveting the action or interesting the plot twists, if I don't feel like I'm meeting someone who feels real, I'm not going to be compelled to read further.

Most good fiction also has a character the writer seems to know more deeply than anyone can actually be known in life, but a few unusual writers can make something great without that.

I love to evoke the bones and meat and thoughts of characters.

I create my own backstory regardless of if I'm told something about the background or not. There's always more that you can develop in your head that makes a character more layered, more honest.

I think the best way to sell a made-up character is to plant his feet into the real earth.