Vince Gilligan Quotes

I like books that have razor-sharp plotting that snaps and moves along. It's not about the main character being different at the end. I don't want my main character to be different in the end. I still want him committed to his ideas, to be steadfast, true and loyal.

Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it's necessary for the characters to change.

I like my characters to go through some changes during a story arc.

The idea behind 'Gloria' was to take a secondary character - the aunt, the mother - and stay with her as she becomes our protagonist.

In film, because you know where the ending is, characters can change, but in television, you substitute revelation for change, and that can be hard to pull off.

I love seeing a story evolve over several books and watching characters develop.

'Breaking Bad' is one of my favorite shows of all time.

I think what good television does well is that it shows characters evolving.

All fiction is about people, unless it's about rabbits pretending to be people. It's all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that's what we call 'the plot'.

I think one of the successes of Gladiator is how we manage to turn on a dime the character from one thing to another where you believe he is one thing and he is something very different.

I've often said the reader knows every bit as much about Thorne as I do. When I created him for 'Sleepyhead,' I was determined he should be a character who would develop, book by book, change and grow as we all do, and who - crucially - would be unpredictable.

One pleasure of working on a trilogy is watching characters warp and grow over time.

I'm drawn particularly to stories that evolve out of the character of the protagonist.

But he did say that the character would be on the sidelines in movies One and Two, and move into the middle with number Three, but I didn't realize he would move in with quite such a bang.

I honestly love nothing better than digging into a really good serialized show, whether it's 'Breaking Bad' or 'Game of Thrones' or 'Justified.'

'The Wire,' I was such a fan of that show the first season - I think that's the best-written show on TV.

I'm trying to make all the characters change and grow, or regress.

Sometimes I know what my characters are moving away from or toward; more often I just wait and see. For instance, though I knew Sinkler in 'The Trusty' was going for water, I did not know that he would meet a fetching young farm wife until I got him into her front yard.

It works in the comic book, but as the audiences have gotten older and more sophisticated, I think the stories need to grow up with them. This is a story about a couple of rival gangs and what goes wrong in a couple of days.

One thing George R. R. Martin does is surprising things to main characters. But he says so himself.

I'm drawn to the classic antihero, the guy who's probably made a bunch of mistakes and really has the capacity to go either way. That's the most interesting type of character for me to watch, to see what decisions they'll make. There's a lot of gray area there for a writer to explore.

I think 'Breaking Bad' is incredible.

When you put your characters in a dire situation, they often do things that surprise even you, so you have to go back and revise your original conception of who they are.

I love to make even villains people you can relate to. When you find out who did it, I think you almost like the person, which is not easy to do.

For me, one thing I love is having an arc for a character.