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. — John Banville
The world is full of fictional characters looking for their stories — Diane Arbus
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. — Richard Bach
Strangely enough, the first character in Fried Green Tomatoes was the cafe, and the town. I think a place can be as much a character in a novel as the people. — Fannie Flagg
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. — Cassandra Clare
Using the device of an imaginary world allows me in some strange way to go to the central issues - it's one of many ways to express feelings about real people, about real human relationships. — Lloyd Alexander
The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth. — William Butler Yeats
Short Fictional Character Quotes
Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures. — Jessamyn West
Fiction is the truth inside the lie. — Stephen King
Character is doing the right thing when nobody's looking. — J. C. Watts
I'm creating an imaginary — it's always imaginary — world in which I would like to live. — Sayings
Character is formed in the stormy billows of the world. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion. — Aristotle
Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything. — Ivana Trump
Fictional Character Image Quotes
We are what we believe we are.
What Are Character Quotes
Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are. — John Wooden
All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. — Pablo Neruda
Life is full of challenges. How you handle these challenges is what builds character. Never be afraid to be who you are. — Erin Brockovich
You're a work of art. Not everyone will understand you, but the ones who do, will never forget about you.
All these boundaries - Africa, Asia, Malaysia, America - are set by men. But you don't have to look at boundaries when you are looking at a man - at the character of a man. The question is: What do you stand for? Are you a follower, or are you a leader? — Hakeem Olajuwon
At the end of your lives you will not be judged by academic successes, the degrees or diplomas earned, the positions held, the material wealth acquired, or power and prestige, but rather on the basis of what you have become as persons and what you are in conduct and character. — Howard W. Hunter
History fades into fable; fact becomes clouded with doubt and controversy; the inscription molders from the tablet: the statue falls from the pedestal. Columns, arches, pyramids, what are they but heaps of sand; and their epitaphs, but characters written in the dust? — Washington Irving
When someone disrespects you, beware the impulse to win their respect. For disrespect is not a valuation of your worth but a signal of their character.
God does not waste an ounce of our pain or a drop of our tears; suffering doesn't come our way for no reason, and He seems especially efficient at using what we endure to mold our character. If we are malleable, He takes our bumps and bruises and shapes them into something beautiful. — Frank Peretti
The most effective way I know to begin with the end in mind is to develop a personal mission statement or philosophy or creed. It focused on what you want to be (character) and to do (contributions and achievements) and on the values or principles upon which being and doing are based. — Stephen Covey
Unless you change how you are, you will always have what you've got. — Jim Rohn
People reveal who they truly are, not by what they say, but by what they do. — David Sinclair
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
A mistake that makes you humble is better than an achievement that makes you arrogant.
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. — Linwood Barclay
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. — Marina Sirtis
There are relatively few science fiction or fantasy books with the main character being an old person. — Elizabeth Moon
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. — Sayings
Writers are magpies, and we collect details about people and we use them for fictional characters. — Caroline Leavitt
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. — Ann Patchett
If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write. — W. Somerset Maugham
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. — Alycia Debnam Carey
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. — George R. R. Martin
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. — Neil Gaiman
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? — Eudora Welty
I quote fictional characters, because I'm a fictional character myself! — Carrie Fisher
Just because you are a character doesn't mean you have character. — Quentin Tarantino
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. — Herman Melville
The world is a stage we walk upon. We are all in a way fictional characters who write ourselves with our beliefs. — Louis Theroux
[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. — Megan Chance
The God of the Old testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction. — Richard Dawkins
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. — Marguerite Yourcenar
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. — Roger Zelazny
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 — Suzanne Collins
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. — Quentin Tarantino
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. — Christopher Lee
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. — Ron Rash
You should grieve if a fictional character is killed. You should care. — George R. R. Martin
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. — Chris Colfer
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. — Meryl Streep
You can have a very intense relationship with fictional characters because they are in your own head. — J. K. Rowling
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. — James Gunn
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. — Jamie Dornan
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. — Bryan Cranston
'Divergent' was my utopian world. I mean, that wasn't the plan. I never even set out to write dystopian fiction, that's just what I had when I was finished. At the beginning, I was just writing about a place I found interesting and a character with a compelling story, and as I began to build the world, I realized that it was my utopia. — Veronica Roth
A writer often wants to change a reader’s perception about the world, which is a political act. But we have to work through character, so helping the reader to feel close to fictional characters is the gate through which we have to usher the reader. — Caryl Phillips
That's what fiction writers do: create characters and do terrible things to them for the entertainment of others. If they feel guilty enough, they write happy endings. — Garry Trudeau
It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does. — William Faulkner
The language fictional characters use is chosen for effect, at least if the author is concentrating. — John M. Ford
We must quit living vicariously through the fictional lives of TV and movie characters, and become the stars of our own real-life stories of adventure and creativity. — Bryant H. McGill
I love playing real people. It's a huge challenge and responsibility which I take on board and which I relish. It also scares me to death. Give me a totally fictional character and I don't have the same sort of responsibility. If, though, I play Sigmund Freud or Robert Maxwell or whoever then there is a responsibility. — David Suchet
Once you're imagining being the main character, and you're having the conversations and actually being there, the magic in fiction writing takes over. — Will Hobbs
Character development is what I value most as a reader of fiction. If an author can manage to create the sort of characters who feel fully real, who I find myself worrying about while Im walking through the grocery store aisles a week later, that to me is as close to perfection as it gets. — J. Courtney Sullivan
I see myself as a novelist, period. I mean, the material I work with is what is classified as science fiction and fantasy, and I really don't think about these things when I'm writing. I'm just thinking about telling a story and developing my characters. — Roger Zelazny
In Conclusion
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