The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
— Richard Dawkins
Inspiring Fictional Character quotations
I am no longer going to become a fictional character to please people. That's too much work.
The world is full of fictional characters looking for their stories
Crime fiction makes money. It may be harder for writers to get published, but crime is doing better than most of what we like to call CanLit. It's elementary, plot-driven, character-rich story-telling at its best.
I've been getting a lot of science fiction scripts which contained variations on my 'Star Trek' character and I've been turning them down. I strongly feel that the next role I do, I should not be wearing spandex.
There are relatively few science fiction or fantasy books with the main character being an old person.
Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh;
they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.
Gayness is built into Batman. I'm not using gay in the pejorative sense, but Batman is very, very gay. There's just no denying it. Obviously as a fictional character he's intended to be heterosexual, but the basis of the whole concept is utterly gay.
Writers are magpies, and we collect details about people and we use them for fictional characters.
Reading fiction not only develops our imagination and creativity, it gives us the skills to be alone. It gives us the ability to feel empathy for people we've never met, living lives we couldn't possibly experience for ourselves, because the book puts us inside the character's skin.
If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write.
Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not.
Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness. Armour yourself in it, and it will never be used to hurt you.
My friend asked me recently, "Do you find it weird that you are now the property of other people's imaginations?" I hadn't thought about that before, this passionate following, with fan fiction and artwork. At first it felt like an invasion of privacy, but then I realized it's nice that the character can be shared.
If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats.
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 existence. Or lack thereof.
I quote fictional characters, because I'm a fictional character myself!
Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else ... Fiction depends for its life on place. Place is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of, What happened? Who's here? Who's coming?
Just because you are a character doesn't mean you have character.
That author who draws a character, even though to common view incongruous in its parts, as the flying-squirrel, and, at differentperiods, as much at variance with itself as the caterpillar is with the butterfly into which it changes, may yet, in so doing, be not false but faithful to facts.
The world is a stage we walk upon. We are all in a way fictional characters who write ourselves with our beliefs.
[I am more than happy to invite my five favorite fictional characters.
]Roland Deschain from Stephen King's Dark Tower series. There's a whole world about Roland left to know. I've got questions. He'd have answers. So pour him a glass of wine.
The God of the Old testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction.
I don't think I ever relinquish a person I have known, and surely not my fictional characters. I see them, I hear them, with a clarity that I would call hallucinatory if hallucination didn't mean something else ... A character whom we create can never die, any more than a friend can die ... Through [my characters] I've lived many parallel lives.
One of my standard - and fairly true - responses to the question as to how story ideas come to me is that story ideas only come to me for short stories. With longer fiction, it is a character (or characters) coming to visit, and I am then obliged to collaborate with him/her/it/them in creating the story.
I see now that the circumstances of ones birth are irrelevent.
it is what you do with the gift of life that determines who you are
I wasn't trying to top Pulp Fiction with Jackie Brown.
I wanted to go underneath it and make a more modest character study movie.
As far as I am concerned, Don Quixote is the most metal fictional character that I know. Single handed, he is trying to change the world, regardless of any personal consequences.
Intensely moving but never sentimental, Academy Street is a profound meditation on what Faulkner called 'the human heart in conflict with itself'. In Tess Lohan, Mary Costello has created one of the most fully realized characters in contemporary fiction. What a marvel of a book.
You should grieve if a fictional character is killed. You should care.
Whoa, I've really got to stop making plans with fictional characters.
It can't be healthy to develop relationships with people who don't exist.
I've thought a lot about the power of empathy.
In my work, it's the current that connects me and my actual pulse to a fictional character in a made up story, it allows me to feel, pretend feelings and sorrows and imagined pain.
You can have a very intense relationship with fictional characters because they are in your own head.
In hard-core science fiction in which characters are responding to a change in environment, caused by nature or the universe or technology, what readers want to see is how people cope, and so the character are present to cope, or fail to cope.
You're in a very nice position as an actor when you're portraying a piece of history that actually happened and portraying characters that actually existed. There's so much more to draw on and your research as an actor becomes much easier than if it's some fiction that you're trying to create a world around and background and history.
When you play a non-fiction character it is more responsibility than when you are playing a fiction character because that person lived, and you do want to pay respect to that.
