Character Sympathy Quotes

Having a son with a disability helps makes Walter White a more sympathetic character. There's no story line that shows Walt Jr. going through the things that you go through as a teenager with a disability. It's always his relationship to other characters. That was my issue with it.

I don't like sympathetic characters.

I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.

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.

For 'Breaking Bad,' people were with Walter White for 99% of that show, even though that guy is a monster.

To read a character I'm not sympathizing with is generally quite a good, attractive proposition because I've got somewhere to go, I've got work to do, to try to understand why they behave like they behave, to relate entirely and understand them and to be completely emotionally connected. That is much more fun 99 percent of the time.

There's a great tradition of actors taking on parts of much less obvious sympathy.

With a film, you just don't have time to build sympathy for the character. But I think we're moving away from that in TV. With TV, you have a little more leeway to allow them to rise and fall and rise again and be much more complicated beings.

I believe that if writers want their readers to care about a character, they have to care themselves. I have to root for a detective who screws up as much as Thorne does, who shares my birthday, my North London stomping ground, and my love of country music, both alt and cheesy.

Amplitude is a powerful quality in fiction. It results in involvement, in sympathy with the characters. After a while, a reader can't avoid being involved with a book, caring about it, even if it's not a particularly good book. You're in it, and you're committed to it.

I like French films, Chabrol in particular. With him, you often get a skewed morality in which you sympathise with the person you shouldn't.

The easiest way for readers to connect with characters and feel sympathy is to make the character entertaining, sympathetic and likeable.

With 'Vikings,' I had the task of making these people interesting and, to a point, sympathetic.

I don't agree with the idea that my characters are unlikeable.