Air Quote by Dana Spiotta

The most important aspect of any story, to me, is character.

— Nora Roberts

You've got to internalize the character. You've got to learn the words. These are separate things, but they work together.

— Robert Forster

Each person has a literature inside them. But when people lose language, when they have to experiment with putting their thoughts together on the…

— Anna Deavere Smith

When you are a sentence-based writer, they have to be good. They have to be really on the spot. Because when you don't have…

— Per Petterson

Language is the ticket to plot and character, after all, because both are built out of language.

— Aimee Bender

Every paragraph should accomplish two goals: advance the story, and develop your characters as complex human beings.

— Nancy Kress

All characters are based on elements of a writer's personal experience.

— Robert Holdstock

The language fictional characters use is chosen for effect, at least if the author is concentrating.

— John M. Ford

When you are writing a character, what the character says is obviously crucial. But what the character doesn't say is absolutely as important as…

— Frederick Busch

It's very hard to articulate the things that are important about writing.

— Tim O'Brien

The only books I give up on are texts where the writer's attention is concentrated so heavily on narrative questions that his or her…

— Anthony Doerr

“Rather, in discussions of books we should cast characters not in terms of stable character traits, but in terms of internal states, feelings, intentions,…

— Peter H. Johnston