Character Agency Quotes

As with most of my work, I started from the abstract, from research, building an intellectual model that slowly became internalized when the characters came alive. It's fascinating what happens to the model you've so assiduously assembled when characters are allowed to run rampant: things you thought essential are broken and other things are vastly improved.

When your characters are really living they tell you what they do.

The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him.

When you cast someone like Natalie Portman, the character can't just be the love interest.

To be true to life, a novel must have an ending that is inevitable given the specific personalities of the characters involved. The novelist must not impose an ending upon them.

Real people are complex, contradictory, and have their own motivations - they can't just be mouthpieces for the writers' point of view.

When I sit down to write a scene, I have a plan in mind, and I'm thrilled when a character disregards my goals and takes the story to a place I hadn't imagined.

I just noticed recently that in one book after another I seem to find an excuse to find some character who, to put it idiotically simply, is allowed to talk crazy.

Think of every character as a main character. They believe they're the main characters in their stories. No one should just be an obstacle.

When I do 'Sweet Tooth,' really, whatever I want to do with the characters kind of goes. I'm sort of in charge.

I couldn't write a female who fell to pieces every time something didn't go right in her life. She would just annoy me too much.

Characters must not brood too long. They must not waste time running up and down ladders in their own insides.

When you're playing a supporting character, you don't really have a lot of control of the quality of the film.

I've never played a character that is just beautiful, but sometimes you can read scripts that sound so shallow, like women are objects. I've never done something like that, though.

As the years have gone on and you start to know your character better than some of the writers and directors do, you get a little bit more of a world in which you can say, "I think it would be really great, if this year, her fate wasn't determined by the boys," or that kind of thing. You have to pick your battles and make sure that you've earned the right to talk about that.

I do not speak through my characters; it's not a ventriloquist act.

Let your characters talk to each other and do things. Spend time with them - they'll tell you who they are and what they're up to.

Get inside her head. Get inside any character's head and ask what they want in this scene. And if you work from the perspective of what they want, there's not going to be any wrong answer. There's going to be some boring answers, but none of them are going to be wrong. As long as she has agency, then you're on the right track.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm a character being written, or if I'm writing myself.

For me, everyone I write of is real. I have little true say in what they want, what they do or end up as (or in). Their acts appall, enchant, disgust or astound me. Their ends fill me with retributive glee, or break my heart. I can only take credit (if I can even take credit for that) in reporting the scenario. This is not a disclaimer. Just a fact.

I can't control life for my grandchildren, so how could I control a story? Sometimes I try to force something, and after working and working on that chapter, I realise that I am swimming against the current. I will never get there. So I have to let go of whatever previous idea I had about it and let the characters decide.

As a storyteller, I've always been fascinated with the idea of recreating this notion of choices in fiction. My dream was to put the audience in the shoes of the main protagonists, let them make their own decisions, and by doing so, let them tell their own stories.

Every character I play has to be the hero of his own story, the way we're all heroes of our own lives.

That was all Rose, and Rose knew what she was doing. Her main thing was story.

The number 1 thing that I don't want to see in a story is when characters exist simply to be proven wrong.