Ashton Kutcher Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

To create characters, one must build background. And one of the tools we use is improvisation.

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

Once you start writing a character visually, you're in trouble.

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

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.

Creating characters is just another way to express a type and put that type to use.

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.

What I'm really trying to do is create unique characters.

When you create a character, you create it for yourself - you do whatever you want. It's your job to explore it in as many different avenues as you can in order to make it a fully wounded character.

I mean, can I really create a full, three-dimensional character? I don't know anymore. I'm certainly going to try.

I see people sometimes who remind me of my narrators.

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?'

I love... What's gratifying to me is when you make/create a character and a human being, a person who lives entirely and who has their own existence, just merely from the words on a page.

Sometimes a character is really based on research that you do. Other times it's just based on your imagination or perhaps your conversation with the director. Or sometimes all of the above. It depends on the movie and character.

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

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.'

Creating characters is like throwing together ingredients for a recipe. I take characteristics I like and dislike in real people I know, or know of, and use them to embellish and define characters.

I don't base any character on a real person, and really don't do composites either. I make them up.

I do write long, long character notes - family background, history, details of appearance - much more than will ever appear in the novel. I think this is what lifts a book from that early calculated, artificial stage.