Backgrounds Quote by John Steinbeck

Characterization requires a constant back-and-forth between the exterior events of the story and the inner life of the character.

— David Corbett

The most important basis of any novel is wanting to be someone else, and this means creating a character.

— Antonio Tabucchi

“The story can be great but the characters make the book”

— R.P. Heinz

The main character in the book is usually someone you're identifying with because the story is being told through this person's mind.

— Jay Asher

“There can't be much development of action or theme in such stories, but at least there is some. By contrast, in the short short…

— Irving Howe

There is nothing that's been in any of my novels that, in my view, hasn't been either illuminating surroundings or defining a character or…

— Jim Webb

“The importance of a story doesn't merely lie in the development of its plot and the characters involved in it, but in its exploration…

— Gulzar

“If I imagine the genesis of a novelist in the form of an exemplary tale, a "myth," that genesis looks to me like a…

— Milan Kundera

Any author gets inspired by the experiences and events that happen to him or his immediate circle. While that's where the seed or the…

— Ravi Subramanian

There's nothing more liberating about starting with something that is not written. You pretty much create the history of that character and that character's…

— IronE Singleton

“life rarely finds its exact likeness in a novel, that is hardly fiction’s purpose,”

— Katie Kitamura

We are all potentially characters in a novel--with the difference that characters in a novel really get to live their lives to the full.

— Georges Simenon