Greg Berlanti Quotes

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.

I just want to tell a good story, so I always ask myself, 'Are these people real to me?'

In a novel, if you're any good, you don't just have good people or bad people. You have complicated people. You have real people.

'Star Wars' is very black and white, and honestly, I like it that way. But fantastical settings like that work best when the characters within them feel real. Real people have conflicts and make mistakes and get it wrong sometimes.

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 treat all my characters as if they were real, and I am scrupulous about the details of their lives.

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

I always try to write about believable people.

I've found I can plunge the characters into whatever absurd, awful situation, and readers will follow as long as the writer makes them seem like 'real people.'

My characters surprise me constantly. My characters are like my friends - I can give them advice, but they don't have to take it. If your characters are real, then they surprise you, just like real people.

I love storytelling. I love characters that are complicated and layered, real people, that you see why they do what they do.

I can tell very early on, reading a script, within six or seven pages, whether I'm looking at real people, and whether I can see and hear real people.

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.

I want to tell authentic, real stories with real characters.

Plot and character are virtually the same thing.

In terms of the pilot, you have to introduce a lot of characters in a very short period of time, and you have to paint with slightly broad brush strokes because you just need to give an audience an idea of who these people might be.

The instant that movies became described as character driven was the instant when characters stopped mattering in movies. In other words, the birth of the notion of the character-driven movie coincided with the birth of movies in which characters were incidental to the very activities in which they engaged.

The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him.

I just want to keep finding special characters that I feel like I can bring to life and characters that are real and not superficial.

I enjoy the writing process and producing; I enjoy seeing an idea come to fruition. I'm driven by very complex characters. You look at the pilot of 'Breaking Bad,' where there's so much depth to the character, you can't help but be invested when you watch.

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

Every reader knows about the feeling that characters in books seem more real than real people.

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 try to ground most of my characters in reality somehow. That's kind of what I bring to the table.