Anna Letitia Barbauld Quotes

I like telling stories of imperfect people because most people are imperfect.

Nobody's really unsympathetic, I think. People do good and bad things. If a character's totally unsympathetic, they're not real and I'm not interested. Even the real monsters have to have a spark of something you can relate to.

I'm drawn to villains that are three-dimensional and raw and that I can kind of see in my own life.

I work very hard at creating complex characters, a mix of positives and negatives. They are all flawed. I believe flaws are almost universal, and they help us understand, sympathise and, paradoxically, feel closer to such characters.

Flaws make us all human, and you're rooting for characters because of those flaws. It's ageless if you're interested in relationships and the way people can or can't relate to each other.

Fallible characters are more interesting than superheroes in the end.

I think flawed characters are important, because no one is perfect.

The characters are whole, real people to me that I'm getting to know, and since real people are all flawed, so are my characters, I hope.

I guess you could say that no matter what the characters are enduring, I try to make them retain their humanity. Their self-absorbed, grouchy, selfish, aggravating humanity.

Nobody's really unsympathetic, I think. People do good and bad things. If a character's totally unsympathetic, they're not real and I'm not interested.

I fall in love with characters when they're out of their element or are uncomfortable and you really feel for them in a knee-jerk sympathetic way.

Novels attempt to render human experience; that's really all they are. They are meant to convey empathy for the character.

We're all flawed, and we all make mistakes, and we all have weaknesses. And those are the kind of people I want to see onscreen, the ones that feel like real flesh-and-blood human beings and not the weird, whitewashed, Hollywood stand-ins for people with the rough edges sanded off that I can't connect to because they just don't resonate with me.

I think we love watching people that are flawed because we're all flawed.

All of my characters are less than perfect.

Everyone loves characters that are relatable or who have unique quirks or tragic flaws.

You don't want to play a perfect person; no one cares about that.

When it comes to your hero, what the readers really fall in love with are his flaws. No one ever falls in love with a perfect hero.

A likable character isn't one who does nothing wrong.

I let characters be human and flawed and relatable. When we do things that aren't that great, we can understand it.

I let characters be human and flawed and relatable.

All my characters are quite relatable, as they are flawed, true, and honest. All of us are flawed; nobody is pure and pious.

I don't want to watch a show or a movie about the guy who doesn't have any problems, who is sort of a goodie two shoes and just does everything morally right, because that's not the person I relate to. That's not who I am. That's not what anyone is.

Maybe it’s not, in the end, the virtues of others that so wrenches our hearts as it is the sense of almost unbearably poignant recognition when we see them at their most base, in their sorrow and gluttony and foolishness. You need the virtues, too—some sort of virtues—but we don’t care about Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina or Raskolnikov because they’re good. We care about them because they’re not admirable, because they’re us, and because great writers have forgiven them for it.

If you have a character that seems to be all perfect, it's hard to relate to him because when you read a story you really want to empathize with the character that you are reading about. And it's hard to empathize with someone who is flawless and who has no problems.