Paul Rust Quotes

I think the Greeks were the only people ever to nail character. Their heroes are deeply flawed.

Fiction writers tend to err either making people more than they are or less than they are. I'd rather err on the side of the former.

That's the thing about writing for a lot of the villains is that, as a writer, you kind of have to put the best part of your own personality aside and instead focus on whatever little strange quirks you may have in your personality.

I choose grey characters, as I enjoy playing a human character. I don't shy away from showing the shortcomings of my characters.

I like to write first-person because I like to become the character I'm writing.

The characters are whole, real people to me that I'm getting to know, and since real people are all flawed, so are my characters, I hope.

With my physicality and my face, I don't think I could pull off a completely righteous guy. There's something devious about my eyes. I like characters with flaws and to see how they overcome those flaws. I want to play real people, and they're flawed, not perfect.

I'm a sucker for a screwed-up protagonist. We all have issues.

I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

As a writer, it's a great narrative tool to have that character who is slightly detached but at the same time observant of his reality, because I think that's pretty much what being a writer is - being there, watching and internalizing.

In the best stories, people are morally complex; they are flawed. We read them because the world is flawed, and we want to see it truthfully represented. And because it can be thrilling to be shocked and upset, and even to feel, for chilling moments, what it's like to be a bad person.

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 like telling stories of imperfect people because most people are imperfect.

Exposing characters and their shortcomings gives me great comfort. It's always great to write about someone more mixed up than yourself.

I think all of us, under certain circumstances, could be capable of some very despicable acts. And that's why, over the years, in my movies I've had characters who didn't care what people thought about them. We try to be as true to them as possible and maybe see part of ourselves in there that we may not like.

I have an affinity for writing in the first person. I love the intimacy of being dropped inside the character.

All of my characters are less than perfect.

To me the interesting main character is never the one without flaws.

I work very hard at creating complex characters, a mix of positives and negatives. They are all flawed. I believe flaws are almost universal, and they help us understand, sympathise and, paradoxically, feel closer to such characters.

Because I write fiction, I don't write autobiography, and to me they are very different things. The first-person narrative is a very intimate thing, but you are not addressing other people as 'I' - you are inhabiting that 'I.'

I don't want a perfect character, I want a character who has, as strange as it sounds, some humanity, some flaws, some needs.

In a novel, if you're any good, you don't just have good people or bad people. You have complicated people. You have real people.

I strongly believe that the art of the novel works best when the writer identifies with whoever he or she is writing about. Novels in the end are based on the human capacity, compassion, and I can show more compassion to my characters if I write in a first person singular.

I think all characters are facets of the writer. In a way, they have to be if you're going to write them convincingly.

Flaws make us all human, and you're rooting for characters because of those flaws. It's ageless if you're interested in relationships and the way people can or can't relate to each other.