Nancy Kress Quotes

In a novel, it's hard to keep track of everybody.

If a movie has more characters than an audience can keep track of, the audience will get confused and lose interest in the story.

Quite often my narrator or protagonist may be a man, but I'm not sure he's the more interesting character, or if the more complex character isn't the woman.

It's really important to stay engaged and involved in the character.

I do feel more towards certain characters who have depth and intelligence.

Sure, I'll have characters drop in and out of books but the main cast of characters always changes. Maybe I'm wrong but I think if had the same joe detective guy or gal, I wouldn't write them as well; I wouldn't do as good a job.

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.

My characters surprise me constantly. My characters are like my friends - I can give them advice, but they don't have to take it. If your characters are real, then they surprise you, just like real people.

Any character that can't be kept straight, to me, isn't a character who should be in the book - you know, anyone not vivid enough to have a claim on my attention.

If you write fiction, you have to love your characters. It's like your family. You don't have to like them, but you have to love them.

I didn't want to just do a show where my character stood out and other characters were flat or one-to-two-dimensional. I wanted everybody to have meat.

I think I try to look at all my films and break them down because, at the end of the day, it's about creating characters that you like.

The idea of having different characters is really just to get the storyline across, you know? Coming from one particular character makes, to me, the story boring. I get that mainly from novels and that style of writing or movies where there's multiple characters who carry the storyline.

It's very important that all the supporting characters feel like they've existed in the world, that they've had a history, and they'll go on to have a history within the scope of the story rather than just popping up and then disappearing.

Whenever I write, I write very dialogue-heavy things because I love to force my characters to interact with one another.

I want to do roles that are important for the story and not there for ornamental value or to just aid another character in the film which is often a 'friend's role' in mainstream films.

When we decided to make 'DMC5,' one of the things we said off the bat is, 'Let's make a new character.'

We are trying to push the envelope with a lot of characters in 'Brothers.' We are going out of the way and being honest to our roles.

In the 'Buffy' room, it was never about a plot twist, ever. It was always about, 'Tell the story, tell the characters, complicate their lives, make things get worse,' but we never worked backwards from the plot, and it was always a great lesson.

One of the things that separates a good genre movie from a bad genre movie, I always think, ironically, is when you care about the people. The dime a dozen ones are where you don't have any awareness of the character.

Now there are certain things you have to prepare - like dialect and special skills. But in the moment, interaction between two characters on the page doesn't need - for me, I don't need to prepare that.

As an actor, I like as much time with the material as possible and given the opportunity, time spent with the other actors in the scene. But that is a rare luxury in working in any TV series.

Everybody has parents. As a dramatist, whenever you write a character, you must write their parents as well, even if the parents aren't there.

I believe the most intricate plot won't matter much to readers if they don't care about the characters, especially in a series. So I try to focus hard on making each character, whether villain or hero, have an interesting flaw that readers can relate to.

I like movies about people and movies with characters; that's what I'm drawn to as a person who likes to create these characters within the story, but I like it all, really.