Jeffrey Dean Morgan Quotes

To combine telling an interesting story with brilliantly written characters is the most difficult thing to do.

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.

The writer of stories or of novels settles on men and imitates them; he exhausts the possibilities of his characters.

Whichever character I'm using and wherever I am in my mind dictates what kind of story I'm going to tell.

At the end of the day, it's really, really difficult to make a brand-new show, to write a pilot where you have to introduce characters and everyone has to kind of be dynamic and have something different for themselves.

I'm more interested in character than events. I've observed that about myself as a writer. I find events, even the most dramatic sort, not to be such fertile ground.

I enjoy the writing process and producing; I enjoy seeing an idea come to fruition. I'm driven by very complex characters. You look at the pilot of 'Breaking Bad,' where there's so much depth to the character, you can't help but be invested when you watch.

When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him.

Especially when I write, I want to get out of people's heads and have them speak and have them get dressed and have them go to work.

Characters are incredibly important, but I tend to build them around the plot during the outline stage. However, once I'm writing the manuscript, the characters I'm writing dictate how the plot unfolds.

I tend to write one character at a time. But I don't write the entirety of one character at a time.

Tricker the Squirrel is the best piece I ever wrote. It's intricate.

So I work hard to present the human side of my characters while not neglecting the plot.

Because they feel that without them telling you to do this, you wouldn't have had the characters that you have, you wouldn't have the book that you have.

Your job as a writer is to find storylines, narrative structures, and characters to show the things that you believe rather than saying them or telling them.

For me, plot always comes out of character, so I had to be sure of my characters.

That's one of those things that will really hurt me personally, if I label a character or think about what it might do if it were to do well. I just try to do a good job with it.

If you don't spend the time you need on developing characters and finding stories, complicated stories, the audience gets tired because they think they're seeing the same thing again and again.

My feeling is that I don't really care about the genre or the size of the movie. I care about the quality of the writing and the quality of the characters.

I actually don't know much about Jaclyn Moriarty's process or where her stories come from or who inspired her characters. I just know that reading her books feels like sitting with friends. Her characters feel alive.

It always comes down to script and characters.

I love all the characters I write.

You can't take a story and just stretch it out - that does not a novel make.

I may have a story idea but everything starts moving when I am able to see my characters clearly. They then organically lead or respond to the story or the universe I want to create.

I like to let the story flesh itself out, and usually, the characters make their own decisions as things get under way. Dialogue especially seems to write itself once I'm familiar with the characters and their backgrounds.