Character Quote by Jasper Fforde

There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.

— Doris Lessing

The writer's original perception of a character or characters may be as erroneous as the reader's.

— Stephen King

Novels are . . . an unsurpassed form to understand people.

— Henning Mankell

That's the fine balance of a fiction writer...to be able to give your characters enough freedom to surprise you and yet still maintain some…

— Alan Lightman

A well-written character is one where you don't know in which direction it's going; the character could spring a surprise any moment.

— Rasika Dugal

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

I think when you have a character as richly drawn, I suppose then there are subconscious, mental notes that you've made.

— Cate Blanchett

When you are drawing characters to serve a plot purpose, you tend to get flat, stereotyped, unliving characters.

— Tom Rickman

“Novelists congratulate themselves on their creation of this kind of “character” or that kind of “character,” and readers pretend to talk knowingly about “character,”…

— Sōseki Natsume

We all have these tendencies in us that could go this way or that. I think that's the real key in writing. To look…

— Paul Haggis

That instinct for human character that is perhaps inherent in an imaginative writer.

— Graham Greene

“A great number of elements in the characters’ lives, both psychic and factual, are not communicated to us. […] These characters, I believe, enjoy…

— Pierre Bayard