120 quotes found
“The best part of the fiction in many novels is the notice that the characters are imaginary.”
“A writer must empathize with all of their characters because he is the one that bestowed upon them both joy and misery.”
“Typically, we start out with enthusiasm and then grow unsure--sometimes about everything.”
“Is the writer cruel that makes his characters suffer only to bring them to triumph or tragedy in the end?”
“Characters are just extensions of my madness.”
“Reading is a full contact sport; we crash up against the wave of words with all of our intellectual, imaginative, and emotional resources. What results can sometimes be as much our creation as the ...”
“The magic and the danger of fiction is this: it allows us to see through other eyes. It takes us to places we have never been, allows us to care about, worry about, laugh with, and cry for people w...”
“This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are imaginary, excepting only certain of the fairy folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their exist...”
“Like the 'good' characters in literature, the sane don't have any memorable lines.”
“When writing fiction, you learn to only put things and characters in, that are going to progress your story. There is something to be learned about that approach in real life”
“You want to avoid at all costs drawing your characters on those that already exist in other works of fiction. You must learn about people from people, not from what you read. Your reading should co...”
“We have all been fooled into believing in people who are entirely imaginary--made-up prisoners in a hypothetical panopticon. But the point isn't whether or not you believe in imaginary people; it's...”
“Heavy is the head that holds the pen of creation. We construct these characters from nothing, molding them from our imaginations. We give them hopes and dreams and unique personalities until they f...”
“I have closed my study door on the world and shut myself away with people of my imagination. For nearly sixty years I have eavesdropped with impunity on the lives of people who do not exist. I have...”
“I intend to see that justice is done by presiding, in the manner of the omnipotent Walter Mitty, as chief justice of a tribunal trying the case of those plotting further advances for the Chinese ch...”
“That's what novels are: They're amalgams of archetypes, collections of random traits one observes in other people through life, blended into fresh characters.”
“Rob; you could have been someone I wanted to be with. But youre not; you never spoke to Niall, not really. You joked and you danced, but how often did you really talk? You never even told him you l...”
“I wish stories were kinder to their characters," Maddie said. "But I guess trouble is more interesting to read about.”
“Hard and cruel though it may seem," said the Cardinal, "yet we, who hold our high office as keepers and watchmen to the story, may tell you, verily, that to its human characters there is salvation ...”
“. . . clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude.”
