John Irving Quotes

I always think once you have the lead protagonist, you cast around that character.

But protagonists are protagonists and heroes are heroes.

I didn't plan to write YA - I had a story that simply wasn't working as a straight-up fantasy novel.

The writer must be a participant in the scene... like a film director who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work, and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least the main character.

If you can find a way your character moves, you know more about your character than you'd ever dream.

I actually don't like saying 'lead character,' which is an interesting thing. If you say there's a lead, then there has to be someone to follow.

Dhanam' is one of the interesting scripts that I came across. It centers around me.

It was great fun to do because of the central character. With The Girl in the Spider's Web, the girl is really the central character. She's the whole thing.

My work is to know the characters intimately and to tell their story.

I learned to separate the story from the writing, probably the most important thing that any storyteller has to learn-that there are a thousand right ways to tell a story, and ten million wrong ones, and you're a lot more likely to find one of the latter than the former your first time through the tale.

Axiom : Novel must have either one living character or a perfect pattern: fails otherwise.

I believe in characters as vehicles of exposition. Their voices are full of hidden clues, and I like to listen to them.

When you're in sync with the director, on the type of movie you want to make, the arc of the characters, how the characters intertwine and interact, plotlines and story, and things like that, it really makes a difference.

To be honest, I don't think of any of my characters as minor characters - they're all the main characters in a story that I don't necessarily get to tell.

I'm hesitant to do leading man character roles because I think they can be a little boring in terms of needing to be the everyman who navigates the amazing stuff around them.

I find the characters in my head and the more I write about them, the better I get to know them.

Because the writer must be a participant in the scene, while he's writing it — or at least taping it, or even sketching it. Or all three. Probably the closest analogy to the ideal would be a film director/producer who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least a main character.

I would love to play a main character and then play different characters as well. I would want for it to be a sitcom, multicamera, audience - that's definitely a dream. It's in the works, so... it's closer than everybody thinks it is.

Clearly, you can think back and see that a character has had enormous odds stacked against him and has to overcome them. It's usually a guy, I'm afraid. But then you're setting up a new movie you have amnesia about these meetings, when you've discussed it more analytically.

If you get the characters right you've done sometimes nearly half the work. I sometimes find I get the characters right then the characters will often help me write the book - not what they look like that's not very important - what people look like is not about their character. You have to describe the shape they leave in the world, how they react to things, what effect they have on people and you do that by telling their story.

That's a long way of saying no, I'm always too bound up in thinking about the characters in whatever I'm working on and trying to make good to dwell on characters from previous books.

Novels without female characters were a lifeless desert.

You can never know enough about your characters

No matter what the characters you play, you have to find the differences in them, especially when you are doing a political movie.

Being an author means, almost by definition, that you make up characters and then complicate their lives. That's it, really. You make up characters and give them problem after problem after problem.