The characters can't be wittier than people are in real life. They have to be character witty.
quote by Dylan Moran

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Character is something you forge for yourself; temperament is something you are born with and can only slightly modify. Some people have easy temperaments and weak characters; others have difficult temperaments and strong characters. We are all prone to confuse the two in assessing people we associate with. Those with easy temperaments and weak characters are more likable than admirable; those with difficult temperaments and strong characters are more admirable than likable. Of course, the optimum for a person is to possess both an easy temperament and a strong character, but this is a rare combination, and few of us are that lucky.
quote by Sydney J. Harris

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What's most interesting and most real to me in my work is to never make the role a complete character, because then you lose a part of the truth. I can't say that this person is just like this or like that. Because you can never do that with real people in real life, so if you try that on stage you lose the truth. Since I myself strive to be able to be a great many things, I also want my character to have that very same liberty. Eventually in that way it will add to a sort of completeness. But it is the story that is told that is the interesting thing and the situations the character is in. And as we humans always are shaped by a special situation or given circumstances, I can never ever say: Thus is my character.
quote by Lena Olin

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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.
quote by Laurell K. Hamilton

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I think that there are some characters that you can just allow the truth of your character as a human being in your real life to come through.
quote by Edward James Olmos

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Basically, I think that there are some characters that you can just allow the truth of your character as a human being in your real life to come through.
quote by Edward James Olmos

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A Mirror Image
How many times when reading a book,
do we identify with the characters within?
Their traits they have we share,
their loves and heartaches
their lives go through somehow mirror our own.
It’s as if the author was writing about us.
As though he has put us under a microscope
and then writing down everything, he saw.
However, we know this isn’t so
because he or she has written
segments of their own life
and by accident they happen to mirror ours.
Every writer will tell you
that they have their characters under control.
Having written numerous novels,
I know the characters take on a life of their own
and do what they want to do.
We become their instrument as they guide us on our way.
We end up writing what they want us to say.
To every writer his characters are real,
they live, breathe and feel.
The more you write about them,
the more alive they become.
So the next time you pick up a book
and the characters seem real,
they probably are to the author
who looks after them.
24 September 2008
poem by David Harris

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My characters are fictional. I get ideas from real people, sometimes, but my characters always exist only in my head.
quote by S.E. Hinton

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I really enjoy the people. I find them to be better educated and wittier.
quote by Nicholas Lea

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Real-life people are often the hardest to play, people that you recreate who have actually lived, because you have to live up to people's knowledge of those characters.
quote by Derek Jacobi

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When writing a novel a writer should create living people people not characters. A character is a caricature.
quote by Ernest Hemingway

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When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
quote by Ernest Hemingway

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The world is full of novels in which characters simply say and do. There are certainly legitimate genres in which this is sufficient. But in real and lasting writing the character is.
Fairy Tales
they were all fairy tales
believe in what the characters say
but the characters themselves
are not real
a girl on butterfly wings
a boy with the tail of a fish
the sea is real
and so is the air
if the message is not clear
try being there
if you do not know the word in between
try chewing one of the syllables.
poem by Ric S. Bastasa

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Always when I directed the play, I was always trying to cast people not who were necessarily like the characters, but people who I felt had the essential component that the character had, some kind of soul for it.
quote by Patrick Marber

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I think it's definitely beneficial for these characters to have good acting voices behind them and it affects the characters in a way that people can feel like they're part of the game and that they know these characters.
quote by Tara Strong

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

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In real life, people are constantly saying one thing and doing another, but if you write your characters that way, the story becomes too hard to follow.
quote by Jessica Cutler

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All the people in Star Trek will always be known as those characters. And what characters to have attached to your name in life! The show is such a phenomenon all over the world.
quote by Nichelle Nichols

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It's very witty and it's great to see teenage characters have control that way. And you can actually hear about sex and pot and it's okay, it's not completely bad and you can't say that to teenagers.
quote by Caroline Dhavernas

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This is one of his most human and most amusing and witty novels. The characters are very Indian. I decided that I wanted to do a comedy, so this was just the right one.
quote by Ismail Merchant

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