Andrew O'Hagan Quotes

I've always wanted my characters to have more dimension and realistic cores than the ingenue material often provides. It's been a challenge.

My characters are not plastic.

What makes characters real are details, and if you're crafting a person from scratch, you're probably not going to pay as much attention to a question like, 'Does this person bite their nails?'

If I'm reading a script, and I'm not buying it, I need to be able to relate to the character on some level, and they need to have more than one dimension. I need to have an idea of what this guy's thinking about when he's taking a shower not on camera. And if I can't picture him taking a shower and getting dressed, then he's not a real person.

What helps writers, and ultimately, obviously, helps the actors - who should serve the words that the writer puts on the page - is if the character has damages, because then the writers can cultivate and excavate, like a dentist going into a tooth.

I love those preliminary conversations about who a character is. You try on wigs, shoes and clothes. It's preferable when it's not about looking pretty. It can get a little dull to just be cute. We talk about things like, maybe my character can't afford these Christian Louboutins.

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

I wanted more in depth ideas about the character and it never came.

A character who is thought-out is not born, he or she is contrived. A born character is round, a thought-out character is flat.

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.

I abhor badly-written characters and any character, be it man, woman, any character in the film. If it is a well-written character, it will come across as strong.

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

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.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

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

I believe the most intricate plot won't matter much to readers if they don't care about the characters, especially in a series. So I try to focus hard on making each character, whether villain or hero, have an interesting flaw that readers can relate to.

For every book that I write... I develop a history for each person and make sure they are well rounded and flawed. You have to know everything about them from their shoe size, to where they went to school, to what their first pet was, to what they like to eat, to what they want out of life.

There's a bizarre insistence on how a story should be. 'The protagonist must be sympathetic!' they say. Whatever that means. I never engage in that discussion. I never use that word, 'sympathetic.' I just know 'interesting.'

A lot of times, scripts are written so the character is all one way. Even with 'Bringing Out the Dead,' the character was written a little more generic.

Also, in my acting, I feel very much like a storyteller, exploring the flaws of the characters that I interpret. I look for the imperfections, and I love a character that is just so flawed.

I'm sorry, but to ask an audience these days to invest three hours in a show requires your heroine be an understandable and fully rounded character.

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

Developing characters is a strange thing. In the beginning they are abstract and I wonder how to move on from there.

Everyone likes a bit of variety. I'm sure none of my readers only want to read about anti-heroes or villainous protagonists any more than they only want to read about square-jawed heroes doing the right thing. I just write characters than entertain me and hope they'll be ones that other people want to read about, too.

You know, we have to take these characters - who, granted, have their separate personalities but, on a lot of levels, are pretty two-dimensional - and make them into people with flaws, with insecurities.