Cassandra Clare Quotes

To connect with the characters, you need to connect with the world. If the world feels vaguely familiar, I believe the characters will feel relatable.

You have to present characters an audience can relate to.

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.

When I approach any script, I always try to find what I would relate to most in it.

Sympathetic characters usually have a voice. They usually don't have any trouble being heard.

When I'm creating characters, I just want to create characters that I can relate to, and be as honest about them as people as I can be. That's what I want to see when I go to the movies.

Besides, most of the books I like involve people I could never play in a million years.

When you're building a character, or at least when I'm building a character, you start saying, 'How am I going to make people like him?'

I don't care about sympathy. I care about playing a character who's understandable and clear.

Everyone deserves to be the hero of a novel.

It's hard to be scared if you don't feel for a character, because you don't care if they die or live.

I keep getting amazing things to bring to life. There's always something to discover with 'Dr. Bailey,' something that brings her home to the audience, something that makes people say, 'I know that woman. I work with that woman.' It's incredibly flattering and I'm still finding new things with her all the time.

The bottom line always remains the same: What is the basic humanity of the character? How do I make them resonate with the reader?

In terms of the parallels, I've never related less to a character than Riggan.

My characters are always utterly sympathetic to me, if that makes any sense.

You want, in a sense, to relate to the main character, so often, the main character POV is a bit more of a blank slate.

Whether it is television or film, the character on the page has to speak to me.

It's very hard to connect with a character when you haven't gotten a sense of who they are.

Audiences need to engage with characters.

Give me a story which I connect with and then I am going to do it.

Television is about identifying with the characters.

If we get caught up in a story, it's because we've started to care about the characters, and that can only happen if we've moved beneath the surface.

In most films - especially in regards to the protagonist - really from the get-go they set up some scenario that endears that character to the audience. Or imbues him with some nobility or heroism or something.

You need to be able to climb into a narrative and zip it up under your chin. You need to be able to see through the eyes of the hero, smell what he's smelling, hear what he's hearing.

To me, characters are at the heart of great literature.