Ethan Hawke Quotes

I am a firm believer that a good plot makes for a fun enough read, but it's not what binds us. If we don't care about the characters, we won't care - not in a lasting way - about what's happening to them.

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.

What makes an audience watch something and care about the characters is the emotional life of the characters.

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.

You can't make the audience fall in love with a character you don't like.

The real trick to these movies and making the big action sequences work - and I've forgotten this sometimes and screwed it up - the characters really have to be humanized. Because you can have the greatest special effects in the world, but if you don't care about the people in those effects, there's no impact.

People like the comedy more when they care about the characters.

The characters are always the focal point of a book for me, whether I'm writing or reading. I may enjoy a book that has an intriguing mystery or a good plot, but to become one of my real favorites, it has to have great characters.

And the most important thing - apart from telling a good, believable story, and being a true character - is to be someone the audience will care about, even if you're playing a murderer or rapist.

I try to create characters that I am fascinated by on some level or intrigued by or can't stand.

I think, when I write, one of the things that I'm really attempting to do is I'm attempting to humanize my characters.

My characters are always utterly sympathetic to me, if that makes any sense.

If I can get the audience to connect with the characters emotionally - and they love who they are, they love the larger-than-life situation that they're in, but most of all get the audience invested in the characters - then I always feel like I can sort of put them in the most outrageous circumstances, and the audience is okay to go with that.

I'm focused on finding characters I connect to.

A new character is like bringing a new human being into your life.

Audiences need to engage with characters.

I get very invested in characters; it's the only way I find that I can write a book and really make it work.

All my characters have been relatable.

If we get caught up in a story, it's because we've started to care about the characters, and that can only happen if we've moved beneath the surface.

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

As a writer, you have to realize that people want to like the characters, so you have to be careful to keep them involved.

When you're writing a book, with people in it as opposed to animals, it is no good having people who are ordinary, because they are not going to interest your readers at all. Every writer in the world has to use the characters that have something interesting about them, and this is even more true in children's books.

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.

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.'

If you can't laugh at your own characters, or shed a tear for them, or even get angry at one of them, no one else will either.