David Henry Hwang Quotes

A lot of the time, I read something I've written, and I think, 'Well, that's competent. It's not exactly breaking any boundaries. It's not exactly transgressive. It's just a bunch of fake people in a room talking to each other. But maybe there's a value to that.'

I think that writers are best served by sticking to their writing. Not having loads of theories about the best way to position the writing. I think that if the writing is good and the point of view is strong, the writing is going to take care of itself.

You don’t have the slightest idea of what it means to write a scene and a character in the English language, with images and words chock full of received meaning.

I have a very healthy appetite for good writing and good characters. Having weak writing is my biggest fear.

Ultimately, it's about the quality of the writing whatever style you are writing.

I love a mask. It's why I've got a thing about good writing. When you're acting, you're going into someone else's work. You're behind his words; it's not you.

My characters are not plastic.

Give me good writing, and I'll play it all day.

Good writing is good writing, and I'm so happy when I read it.

It's all in the writing. The writing has got to be there. Whether that's dialogue or character, or whatever, it doesn't matter. As long as they've done something special, than you can do something special.

You can make bad writing 'OK,' but... you really need to start with a good script and with characters that are three-dimensional and with great dialogue. It's a difficult lesson to learn because good writing is hard to come by, but it's definitely worth chasing.

Mainly I love working on good writing.

You're only reduced to a cliche if you don't humanize a character.

Your characters should be as smart as you are, if not smarter.

When you're writing a story or an actor playing a role, you should never think of your characters as heroes or villains. You have to think of them as people first.

In many of my plays, there was a kind of autobiographical character in the form of a son or young man. The purpose of it, of course, was to write about myself. That character was always the least fully realized. Eighteen years later, you realize, That's what he was about.

Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea. If you think about fiction writing as a spectrum, where at one end of the spectrum in the infrared, are the story tellers, and the people for whom creation of wonderful characters and telling a good story is the most important thing.

I think my very earliest stories were all intellectual exercises and I was writing from experiences I had never had about characters who were about an inch deep.

But the quality of writing in the series [game of Thrones] is paramount. That's probably why all of us are involved in this and all of us are quite so loyal to it, because we don't have to expend a lot of energy trying to make a silk purse out of a pig's ear. The quality of the writing is really good, and that's what makes playing a character so enjoyable, whether he's heroic or villainous.

I see myself as a novelist, period. I mean, the material I work with is what is classified as science fiction and fantasy, and I really don't think about these things when I'm writing. I'm just thinking about telling a story and developing my characters.

Everybody can write a beginning and an ending, but to actually define that middle point where everything will go from professional to person, where everything will change, is always the hardest part, because it can very easily be too constructed, too artificial.

When the first-rate author wants an exquisite heroine or a lovely morning, he finds that all the superlatives have been worn shoddy by his inferiors. It should be a rule that bad writers must start with plain heroines and ordinary mornings, and, if they are able, work up to something better.

The story is the only thing that's important. Everything else will take care of itself. It's like what bowlers say. You hear writers talk about character or theme or mood or mode or tense or person. But bowlers say, if you make the spares, the strikes will take care of themselves. If you can tell a story, everything else becomes possible. But without story, nothing is possible, because nobody wants to hear about your sensitive characters if there's nothing happening in the story. And the same is true with mood. Story is the only thing that's important.

In fiction writing ideas have to be handled extremely carefully. You can't let your characters just be mouthpieces for your ideas. They have to live and breathe on their own.

David Corbett's The Art of Character offers a deep inquiry into the creation of character for the novice writer, with valuable nuggets of wisdom for the seasoned storyteller. If you are a writer, it should be on your desk.