Stan Lee Quotes

A character on a page has to feel real, and for me the greatest fun is if you could gender-swap the role.

You try to make characters you care about, and I think realism helps. Even though this is a high concept, the characters have got to be real.

It was fun to create characters who had truth to them but were also made up so as not to completely offend!

What's the difference between Hollywood characters and my characters? Mine are real.

I knew what kind of genre 'Casa de mi Padre' was going for. But my character, specifically, I think is very real.

I love making characters real and believable, through my own experience and choices.

My characters are not plastic.

There's no such thing as a perfect person, so it makes no sense to write a perfect person. I don't know any author who'd try. And we write characters, not representations of groups.

I don't worry about whether a character is likable, as long as the character is believable.

I always try to write about believable people.

With Erin [from Paper Girls], I wanted to show what she might look like when she's 40, and I wanted it to feel authentic. In terms of inspiration I ended up using my wife for a lot of it. Just to kind of to give me almost an anchor so that I would be invested in making this character real.

That's been my main interest for the last 15 years, is to really make sure the story and the characters take precedence over everything else, and that I give them everything I can to make them exist as actual people.

I think what I find challenging is just trying to bring a truthfulness and a realism to a character.

Hopefully, any character I play has an anchor in reality. The more fantastical characters, or fantastical worlds that they inhabit are really fun and allow you, in some ways, to tell stories and reveal things about our lives that would be harder to take, in a more realistic setting.

If a writer is true to his characters they will give him his plot. Observations must play second fiddle to integrity.

I remember when I was a kid, I loved Sherlock Holmes. I thought Arthur Conan Doyle was one of the greatest writers, because I felt I knew Sherlock Holmes. He existed to me. When I went to England the first thing I did was go to Baker Street to look for his house. I think you've got to try to make all of your characters as empathetic and realistic as possible.

I believe in characters that can be tangible, and that you can actually relate to.

The ability to get inside your character's head in a graphic novel is really fun and useful because one, you can really define the character's voice and two, it's a way easier way to convey what the character's thinking by actually laying out what he's thinking.

I don't think about the stories so much, as the characters themselves. They live on, and they are almost as real as I am.

One of the things that makes characters real is details. Life offers a lot of details. You just have to choose and use them wisely. When you give them to fictional people and a fictional story, their purpose and their meaning changes, so it's best to see the version in the book as fiction entirely, wherever it started out.

Until a character becomes a personality it cannot be believed.

I never base characters on real people - you can get into so much trouble that way!

What's the trick to writing a great female character? Make her human.

To me to write well is to battle stereotypes. To write well is to create three-dimensional characters that seem human.

I believe in storytelling, not story-selling. I want people to believe the characters are real. So I'm a realist.