Daniel Kaluuya Quotes

The thing with videogame characters is that they tend to be really undercooked, and people don't take the time to really flesh them out. They don't treat them with the respect that a writer writing characters in any other medium would treat their character.

When you're writing a book, with people in it as opposed to animals, it is no good having people who are ordinary, because they are not going to interest your readers at all. Every writer in the world has to use the characters that have something interesting about them, and this is even more true in children's books.

I mean, can I really create a full, three-dimensional character? I don't know anymore. I'm certainly going to try.

There's a bizarre insistence on how a story should be. 'The protagonist must be sympathetic!' they say. Whatever that means. I never engage in that discussion. I never use that word, 'sympathetic.' I just know 'interesting.'

I try to build a full personality for each of our cartoon characters - to make them personalities.

A character who is thought-out is not born, he or she is contrived. A born character is round, a thought-out character is flat.

I like the characters that have some redeeming quality or if it's interesting to me in any way.

I think my best quality as a writer is the ability to craft complicated, nuanced, interesting characters.

I want to give my characters nuance.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

To me, characters are at the heart of great literature.

What makes characters real are details, and if you're crafting a person from scratch, you're probably not going to pay as much attention to a question like, 'Does this person bite their nails?'

Look at the Coen brothers. All their minor characters are as interesting as their protagonists. If the smaller characters are well-written, the whole world of the film becomes enriched. It's not the size of the thing, but the detail.

I think it's important that a director be able to know his characters inside and out.

My first job is to write the characters as full and authentic people as well as I can.

For every book that I write... I develop a history for each person and make sure they are well rounded and flawed. You have to know everything about them from their shoe size, to where they went to school, to what their first pet was, to what they like to eat, to what they want out of life.

Don't start writing your novel until you know your characters very, very well. What they'd do if they saw somebody shoplifting. What they were like at school. What shoes they wear. Spend days - weeks, months - being them until they thicken up and start to breathe.

I do write long, long character notes - family background, history, details of appearance - much more than will ever appear in the novel. I think this is what lifts a book from that early calculated, artificial stage.

The most I could hope for is to come and try and develop a character who is interesting, who is interesting to me, who is interesting to fans and who could contribute to the storytelling that is 'Law & Order: SVU.'

What helps writers, and ultimately, obviously, helps the actors - who should serve the words that the writer puts on the page - is if the character has damages, because then the writers can cultivate and excavate, like a dentist going into a tooth.

I love those preliminary conversations about who a character is. You try on wigs, shoes and clothes. It's preferable when it's not about looking pretty. It can get a little dull to just be cute. We talk about things like, maybe my character can't afford these Christian Louboutins.

You really have to create everything in order to come away with a full human being on screen.

My characters are not plastic.

I wanted more in depth ideas about the character and it never came.

I can tell you that as a writer and as a reader, I regard character as king. Or queen. No matter how riveting the action or interesting the plot twists, if I don't feel like I'm meeting someone who feels real, I'm not going to be compelled to read further.