#Characters

"In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations!"(Letter to Alexander Chekhov, May 10, 1886)"

"I don't know where people got the idea that characters in books are supposed to be likable. Books are not in the business of creating merely likeable characters with whom you can have some simple identification with. Books are in the business of creating great stories that make you're brain go ahhbdgbdmerhbergurhbudgerbudbaaarr."

"This isn't the road home. This is a road littered with questions that will inevitably lead to an answer."

"Dreams are the touchstones of our characters."

"A winner is not someone who wins. It's someone who tries and isn't afraid to lose."

"I just like playing interesting, complex, complicated characters. I like films that also have an element of humor."

"With actors like Steve McQueen, Paul Newman and Harrison Ford, what made them such icons is that even in dramatic movies, their characters had a sense of humor."

"I care more about the people in books than the people I see every day."

"In general there should be gay characters in YA because a) surprise, there are gay folks everywhere and b) in my opinion as a father, there’s not a damn thing wrong with my child encountering gay folks in her literature, because see point a)."

"If you're silent for a long time, people just arrive in your mind."

"Be sure not to discuss your hero's state of mind. Make it clear from his actions."(Letter to Alexander Chekhov, May 10, 1886)"

"I hope the wonder of what happens to my characters never goes away. That yearning keeps me writing."

"The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented."

"I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story."

"When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature."

"Truth is irrelevant; what matters is what people believe."

"You take people, you put them on a journey, you give them peril, you find out who they really are."

"You can't go around hoping that most people have sterling moral characters. The most you can hope for is that people will pretend that they do."

"M*A*S*H offered real characters and everybody identified with them because they had such soul. The humor was intelligent and it always assumed that you had an intellect."