Salman Rushdie Quotes

I am a firm believer that a good plot makes for a fun enough read, but it's not what binds us. If we don't care about the characters, we won't care - not in a lasting way - about what's happening to them.

If you care about [the characters] as if they were real, that always helps.

The best books come from someplace deep inside.... Become emotionally involved. If you don't care about your characters, your readers won't either.

I don't think about the stories so much, as the characters themselves. They live on, and they are almost as real as I am.

If you don't invest in the characters, you don't care if they get killed. It's more fun if you know them.

I have to have a character worth caring about. I tend not to start writing books about people I don't have a lot of sympathy for because I'm just going to be with them too long.

Even in horror novels where you know most characters aren't going to make it to the end, it's crucial to have fully fleshed-out characters. If you don't do that, the reader doesn't care what happens to them.

And the most important thing - apart from telling a good, believable story, and being a true character - is to be someone the audience will care about, even if you're playing a murderer or rapist.

A lot of entertainment, and especially in a half-hour format, can be all jokes, all the time. And some of those jokes can be really, really funny, but what I respond to, as a viewers, is identification or caring about the characters.

Certain characters get to me and stay with me for a while.

I try to create characters people want to sit with, even if nothing is happening.

All a writer's characters are imaginary, no matter whether they are based on real people or not. They are people as one imagines them to be.

The movies I make tend not to be quite reality but the characters are inspired by real people and they're always very personal.

In a story, for example, you'll start off with a character who is a little bit of a cartoon. That's not satisfying and you start revising. And as you revise you always are making it better by being specific and by observing more closely, which actually is really the same as saying you love your characters. The close observation equals love of them.

Sometimes I'll be fifty, sixty pages into something and I'll still be calling a character "X." I don't have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking. Then I start to love them. By the time I finish the book, I love them so much that I want to stay with them. I don't want to leave them ever.

When you have a set of characters, you have to fall in love with them and care about them as each individual character.

Every character is a baby. You can't choose between them. If you can, you didn't do your job. You have to fall in love with every character.

It's not as if the stories merge to a point where you think they are your life, but you do let them in the front door and the back door, and it's okay that sometimes certain characters stay for dinner.

My characters are always utterly sympathetic to me.

Of course I know that the twins are only words on a page, and I'm certainly not the sort of writer who talks to his characters or harbours any illusions about the creative process. But at the same time, I think it's juvenile and arrogant when literary writers compulsively remind their readers that the characters aren't real. People know that already. The challenge is to make an intelligent reader suspend disbelief, to seduce them into the reality of a narrative.

Maybe I'm perverse, but the question of "rooting" for a character, or setting out to write a character for whom other people will root, has never had anything to do with why I read or write fiction. As long as the writing and story remain alive, intense, invigorating, provoking, the characters can be as demonic or saintly as the author wants.

One of the things that separates a good genre movie from a bad genre movie, I always think, ironically, is when you care about the people. The dime a dozen ones are where you don't have any awareness of the character.

If there is any secret to my success, I think it's that my characters are very real to me. I feel everything they feel, and therefore I think my readers care about them.

As a writer, you have to realize that people want to like the characters, so you have to be careful to keep them involved.

Everybody claims they have relatable, connectable characters, but those claims often aren't true.