Flannery O'Connor Quotes

First and foremost, I consider myself a storyteller. And I'm endlessly fascinated with people, with what they do and why... and how they feel about it. Which means I'm interested in romance fiction. I was drawn to it, as both a reader and a writer, at the very beginning of my career. It's my kind of storytelling.

Characters make their own plot. The dimensions of the characters determine the action of the novel.

To combine telling an interesting story with brilliantly written characters is the most difficult thing to do.

The writer of stories or of novels settles on men and imitates them; he exhausts the possibilities of his characters.

My books are character-driven. They're not driven by the story.

I tend to spend a lot of time building characters that the reader will believe in and sympathize with.

I'm more interested in character than events. I've observed that about myself as a writer. I find events, even the most dramatic sort, not to be such fertile ground.

I definitely feel that plot flows from character. I don't believe that you can construct a plot and insert people into it.

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.

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

I'll tell you the secret. When you begin with a character, you want to begin by creating a villain.

I tend to write one character at a time. But I don't write the entirety of one character at a time.

My stories are character driven.

Characters are the key to a good book. It took me several novels to comprehend that.

For me, plot always comes out of character, so I had to be sure of my characters.

Most of my films have been very character driven.

I came into this business to create characters that moved people and told stories.

I love all the characters I write.

I could make up characters till the cows came home. Plot's what hard. Very hard.

I may have a story idea but everything starts moving when I am able to see my characters clearly. They then organically lead or respond to the story or the universe I want to create.

If you create a movie that is only character driven, with a weak plot, then you - as a director, you have to make sure you keep pushing the tempo.

I cannot write any sort of story unless there is at least one character in it for whom I have physical desire.

A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results.

Character is plot, plot is character.

The characters are the plot. What they do and say and the things that happen to them are, in a sense, what the plot is. You can't take character and plot apart from each other, really.