Absence Quote by Hal Duncan

I don't much believe in the idea of characters. I write with words, that is all. Whether those words are put in the mouth…

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

I think it's important to leave spaces in a story for readers to fill in from their own experience.

— Annie Proulx

In creative writing, I teach that characters arise out of our need for them.

— Marlon James

Characters are an extension of your imagination.

— Sobhita Dhulipala

I used to say I wasn't interested in writing about characters.

— Emma Healey

“So we all know the cliché characters: the Irish cop, the prostitute with a heart of gold, the writer with a drinking problem, and…

— Craig Hart

I suppose that the sympathetic/unsympathetic debate about characters sometimes feels to me like a misstatement of purpose. I always think of truly complex characters…

— Rick Moody

Whenever we've approached a story, it's always started with the character, and the idea of some character struggling with some part of himself. That's…

— Anna Boden

Short story characters, mine anyway, are usually driven by impulse, not so much by their histories and the choices that they have to make.

— Charles Baxter

Everybody has felt at one time or another that everyone else in the world had a better shot than they did, so when you…

— Robin Hobb

Whichever character I'm using and wherever I am in my mind dictates what kind of story I'm going to tell.

— Anonymous

I've always kind of gravitated toward characters who are a bit distant from the narrator or the point-of-view characters, so that's kind of important…

— Noelle Stevenson