Character Quote by Ben Dolnick

Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself…

— David Foster Wallace

Readers of novels often fall into the bad habit of being overly exacting about the characters' moral flaws. They apply to these fictional beings…

— Edmund White

“Fiction that fails to engage an audience with the emotional intricacies of viable characters will, for many in that audience, simply alienate them with…

— Hal Duncan

“An author has to fit into the skin of her characters, to imagine being trapped by unfortunate and sometimes violent circumstances she herself has…

— Loretta H. Marion

Well, the thing about great fictional characters from literature, and the reason that they're constantly turned into characters in movies, is that they completely…

— Keira Knightley

“Good characters in fiction are the very devil. Not only because most authors have too little material to make them of, but because we…

— C.S. Lewis

I think, above all, the characters in my novels feel universal to the readers.

— Nicholas Sparks

“Good writers may “tell” about almost anything in fiction except the characters’ feelings.”

— John Gardner

I don't know where people got the idea that characters in books a supposed to be likable. Books are not in the business of…

— John Green

I think fiction lends itself to messiness rather than the ideal, and plays well with the ironies surrounding what happens versus what should happen.

— Colm Toibin

“In real life people do occasionally act out of character or do things we wouldn’t normally expect them to do. In fiction, there should…

— Craig Hart

People seem to need a likable protagonist more than ever.

— Daniel Clowes