Irwin Shaw Quotes

I don't know quite how a story develops in my head. It is a bit chaotic. If I am working on a series, one of the main characters at least is already in existence as well as some setting and minor characters. Finding the other main character can be a challenge. Sometimes this character already exists in a minor role in another book.

It's much easier to come back as a recurring character. Because you already know his traits and who he is and what he's about.

Overpopulated fiction can be so confusing that readers put the story down. Under-populated novels can seem claustrophobic or boring. You want the right number of characters for your particular work.

'Homeland' really is one of those shows where they start to write more or less depending on what's kind of going on in a relationship between characters.

You have to create characters - certainly in series TV - who people engage with. They don't have to be nice; you don't have to agree with them. But they do have to be compulsively watchable and believable and human, and you want to know what happens to them.

I try to trace the connection between the characters and that way a story or plot emerges.

If a movie has more characters than an audience can keep track of, the audience will get confused and lose interest in the story.

I'm tired of playing freaking cha-chas, the sassy CIA agent, the best friend homegirl. I'm tired of that!

My favorite part about working in theater is the rehearsal process. I absolutely love the rehearsal process. Working out the characters, figuring the character out, and the relationships between the different characters. I love all of that, which, unfortunately in film, you get very little opportunity to have.

A lot of times I'll make films that are mostly character-driven films - stories that involve people. Like, I make the joke: I like to make movies about human beings that live on Earth.

The bedrock of 'Being Human' has to be characters. I would hope that even if suddenly we had a huge budget per episode, the foundation of the show, and the thing that actually makes it what it is, is character.

I always look for interesting, complex characters. You know, interesting, well-written material.

It's necessary to track characters all the way through an opera. If you're dealing with more than one or two characters, it's very easy to forget that the others have lives of their own that feed into the story.

I am looking for a character that connects to me on some level. It has to be about something, it has to have depth to it and it has to be about something. The story of the character and their relationship with the people and places around them appeal to me and are what I look for.

There are always different roles and questions to be asked about certain characters.

Ultimately, if you look at the characters in my films, you'll see a lot of similarities going all the way back to 'Swingers' with Vince Vaughn's character.

My main problem with fiction is that once my characters get moving, you just have to follow them along and get out of the way of the story, but sometimes they pull me in too many directions, and I need to focus.

When you begin a play, you're going to have to spend a lot of time with those characters, so those characters are going to have to be rich enough that you want to take a very long journey with them. That's how I begin thinking about what I want to write about and who I want to write about.

The idea of having different characters is really just to get the storyline across, you know? Coming from one particular character makes, to me, the story boring. I get that mainly from novels and that style of writing or movies where there's multiple characters who carry the storyline.

Any important series like 'Game of Thrones' or 'The Walking Dead' base their product around the characters and their background.

It's nice to see different dimensions of a character. A love interest and family life are always, I think, important in creating layers and textures.

Movies are about people; there're not about ideas. It's like great novels. Great novels are not about ideas. There's never been a great novel about ideas.

In 'Poster Boys,' every character is well defined.

It's very unusual for scenes to be added for a character.

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.