Character Empathy Quotes

The funny thing is that I feel close to all my characters. Deep, deep inside them all.

I don't know why, but I respond well to tortured characters.

I've written short stories from male perspectives before, and I've never had a problem with it as long as I've understood the character's emotions and motivations.

The characters don't all have to be likable, and they don't all have to be hateable. As long as it's interesting and you connect to them and they resonate with you and you want to find out what happens and it feels authentic, then we have something.

In the vast majority of movies, everything is done for the audience. We are cued to laugh or cry, be frightened or relieved; Hitchcock called the movies a machine for causing emotions in the audience. Bresson (and Ozu) take a different approach. They regard, and ask us to regard along with them, and to arrive at conclusions about their characters that are our own. This is the cinema of empathy.

You need to be invested in what happens. The characters are your conduit to the story. Many modern horror films are fun but not frightening because one has not connected with the characters.

The zombie was just an intriguing character; it is a sympathetic character.

I believe the most intricate plot won't matter much to readers if they don't care about the characters, especially in a series. So I try to focus hard on making each character, whether villain or hero, have an interesting flaw that readers can relate to.

I don't like sympathetic characters.

Chris Guest has his own form. It's a way of working that is really intense, and you can commit a lot, and you focus a lot. You get to bring a lot. You get to bring things maybe you haven't seen before. You're asked to care a great deal for these people who you're playing and create heart and empathy.

I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.

For me, there's a fine line between telling a story that's fictional with lots of details and then removing yourself too much from it, so it's bloodless, a little too fictional.

I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like

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

Mindi Scott has a real talent for getting inside her protagonist's head. She sketches out Coley's story in grand swathes, and then paints in all the little details, so that you feel as though you are enmeshed in Coley's brain: thinking her thoughts, feeling her confusion, anger, and, in the end, pain. I just don't think it's possible to read this book and not identify with Coley in some way.

When I'm writing from a character's viewpoint, in essence I become that character; I share their thoughts, I see the world through their eyes and try to feel everything they feel.

When I am writing, I'm very much on the ground, on the same ground my characters are treading.

It would be hard to play a character you don't like - for me anyway - or can't find something in them to like.

In a novel, I could submerge my ego in a character's and let his perceptions take over.

You have a certain objectivity, as a member of the audience, and you can come away maybe being provoked into a certain discourse or a certain arena of questioning, regarding how you would deal with things that your character has to deal with. Whereas when you're doing a film, once you start asking, "What would I do?," you're getting the distance greater between yourself and the character, or you're bringing the character to you, which I think is self-serving, in the wrong way. The idea is to bring yourself to the character.

That balance between involvement and detachment is what novelists do. It's the ideal relationship between a novelist and a character, I think, total involvement and identity and empathy, stopping short of being autobiographical - in my case, anyway - but also quite detached.

I remember when I was a kid, I loved Sherlock Holmes. I thought Arthur Conan Doyle was one of the greatest writers, because I felt I knew Sherlock Holmes. He existed to me. When I went to England the first thing I did was go to Baker Street to look for his house. I think you've got to try to make all of your characters as empathetic and realistic as possible.

The Sound of Building Coffins is a soulful work from a writer of the weird. Maistros does more than make you feel for his characters and their twisted, damaged lives; he makes you *want* to feel.

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.

I try not to identify too strongly with any of my characters. I like to stand back and see them objectively. I think this is why I often use boys instead of girls, just in case I get too close and lose the overall picture.