Nicolas Cage Quotes

I am a novelist. I traffic in subtleties, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn't have a point.

Clever's not enough to hold me - I want characters who are more than devices to be moved about for Effect.

As a writer, I have to show complexities. Through my writings, I hope to bring out people in different situations and not just one-dimensional beings.

We're not one thing, as human beings, so any character that is written uni-dimensional, that's just a shallow character with shallow writing and shallow acting.

I am attracted to the complexities and deeper truths of characters, and I can't name a favourite role any more than I can name a favourite food!

That's the thing with 'Lost': you can put a spin on so many things.

Characters can be mysterious and you're not really sure which way they might turn at a given point.

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 don't have a great eye for detail. I leave blanks in all of my stories. I leave out all detail, which leaves the reader to fill in something better.

Your structure and format may not be perfect, and you may not have picked the perfect franchise, but if I pick up a script, and the characters are real, whole, complicated and come from a place of somebody who really is feeling it, that's what people remember.

The more secrets and twists in a character, the better.

You're only reduced to a cliche if you don't humanize a character.

I hope people who read my books feel empathy for us and really see us as complicated people.

Whenever you have a role where you don't get to know anything about the character, you have to invent it yourself. You have to feel like it came from somewhere.

I just love characters that are complex, that you can dig into and keep itching the scratch and never quite be satisfied because they have enough going on with them that it's like a giant puzzle.

I want to give my characters nuance.

The easier you make it look, the more difficult it is. Creating characters out of nothing, and making them interesting - and that's another advice I would give to writers.

As an actor, you never really set out to be a stand-out character. You just want to do justice to the story and enjoy playing it, and find all the different nooks and crannies of who someone is. For each part that you get, they're all special and you just try to give everything you can to each one. I don't know whether they're going to be stand out in that way or not factors into my work. They all stand out for me.

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 kind of artistic control.

Mystery is underrated, and understanding is overrated.

My feeling has always been if you entertain people, they give you permission to do more on a thematic or character level.

When a character is born, he acquires at once such an independence, even of his own author, that he can be imagined by everybody even in many other situations where the author never dreamed of placing him; and so he acquires for himself a meaning which the author never thought of giving him.

I personally kind of yearn to play characters who are complex and who strike a truthful chord in me and who are challenged in some way and, I guess, who kind of move through those challenges.

I don't think an actor needs to necessarily go through his things to do his job. I think it's way more important to imagine. And then, when you're imagining, your experiences, your images and your own personal things will show up, but you keep imagining. You don't get stuck in your own personal things, otherwise you are telling your story in every character, and that's not interesting for anybody.

I like stories where there's a center that's mushy and complicated.