Alexander Payne Quotes

I'm not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view.

You need the audience to become invested in the characters and in order to become invested, they need to identify with the characters... and that's why the characters need to be real.

The thing with videogame characters is that they tend to be really undercooked, and people don't take the time to really flesh them out. They don't treat them with the respect that a writer writing characters in any other medium would treat their character.

To me, characters are at the heart of great literature.

I have to have a character worth caring about. I tend not to start writing books about people I don't have a lot of sympathy for because I'm just going to be with them too long.

Whenever people say they didn't like the main character of a book, they mean they didn't like the book. The main character has to be a friend? I don't get that.

I can tell you that as a writer and as a reader, I regard character as king. Or queen. No matter how riveting the action or interesting the plot twists, if I don't feel like I'm meeting someone who feels real, I'm not going to be compelled to read further.

Normally you read a screenplay - and I read a lot of them - and the characters don't feel like people. They feel like plot devices or cliches or stereotypes.

Scripts that make characters a two-sentence description, I'm not interested in.

You have to present characters an audience can relate to.

I don't want to make fictional characters who are perfect - that's a vanilla situation - but the fact is you are allowed to more carefully select and curate what it is you're going to explore.

I always try to make my characters people, and yet I always want to entertain.

One of the things that separates a good genre movie from a bad genre movie, I always think, ironically, is when you care about the people. The dime a dozen ones are where you don't have any awareness of the character.

As a writer, you have to realize that people want to like the characters, so you have to be careful to keep them involved.

My first job is to write the characters as full and authentic people as well as I can.

I like to make definite choices and give my characters as many unique edges as possible.

It's hard to know whether certain characters come to life or not, they either come to have their own life or they don't. I've written many things in which the characters just remain inert.

The way of creating believable characters is not by conforming to a set of PC rules.

All the great writers root their characters in true human behaviour.

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

The thing about the classics it that they are such great characters, they have a great deal of depth and different layers to them. I always find that very stimulating to play.

I try to build a full personality for each of our cartoon characters - to make them personalities.

Most good fiction also has a character the writer seems to know more deeply than anyone can actually be known in life, but a few unusual writers can make something great without that.

I always try to write about believable people.

I try to create characters that I am fascinated by on some level or intrigued by or can't stand.