Michael Palmer Quotes

All fiction is about people, unless it's about rabbits pretending to be people. It's all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that's what we call 'the plot'.

You just play what a writer writes, in terms of what a character chooses to do and how a character chooses to deal with their various relationships.

Characters are so important to a story that they actually decide where the story is going. When I write, I know my characters. I know how things are going to end, and I know some important incidents along the way.

My stories are character driven.

One thing George R. R. Martin does is surprising things to main characters. But he says so himself.

I definitely have character arcs in mind for each character unless I kill them.

Given what I do to my characters, I'm not sure I'd want to meet any of them.

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.

I'm interested in characters and relationships.

You decide which characters you want and then do the best you can to bring their humanity to the forefront in the context that you place them in - the crises in which you've placed them.

Because characters are your creations, you are the one who ultimately gets to decide their fate.

You've got to leave the reader with more than just a name and a costume - they need to know who the character is, what they're like, what kind of attitude they have, what sort of role they play.

I think I would struggle with any job if it was purely about effects. Even as a viewer, those aren't the kind of things that interest me. I think ultimately you have to be connected to characters and their relationships. Otherwise, it's not drama to me.

I usually start with a repulsive character and go on from there.

You treat characters like people you meet in life-friends or mentors.

I'm drawn particularly to stories that evolve out of the character of the protagonist.

I rarely return to characters. My characters, at least most of them, are much more a part of that superorganism that is the story than separate and independent creatures.

I tend to come up with people more than situations - most of my books start with a character.

The characters are always the focal point of a book for me, whether I'm writing or reading. I may enjoy a book that has an intriguing mystery or a good plot, but to become one of my real favorites, it has to have great characters.

The goal is to have every character take on a life of his or her own. Sometimes characters will come into the story that I haven't planned.

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.

But I also wanted to give them an intelligent emotional journey, without having to suspend reality - to be able to look at those characters and see reasons for the relationships and why what happens happens.

In a way, the characters often do take over.

The stories that I like to tell and the movies I like are always grounded in the emotional arc of the characters.

Any author of fiction will tell you that characters don't need to be told what to do.