Characterization Through Dialogue Quotes

If your dream is to tell stories, interesting stories, play interesting people, that's the bottom line. The people that I play have to be extraordinary.

I try to talk about things I know about. But my characters are more of a combination of people or how I imagine people would feel.

A novel makes it possible to understand not just events, but the people who control the events; not only their choices, but also their motives.

I think in some ways, acting and writing are the same. You're getting inside the skin of someone else; you're creating their language and their actions. As a writer, you have to see the whole picture and the structure, and you have to understand every character.

I read the script and try not to bring anything personal into it. I make notes, talk to the director and we decide what kinds of shades should be in the character.

When you write, you hear the characters speaking to you as you take dictation from what they say. And obviously, they had particular personalities when you hear them.

The character of Rosie is based on a woman who used to live in the same apartment building I lived in many years ago. She's taken on a life of her own, of course.

I take stuff from real life and try to make a character out of it. And I try to live the world of the characters a little bit.

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.

Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.

As a writer of fiction, I spend my days inventing real lives for make-believe people; what I create can only seem real.

So much of what I do... is coming up with new characters and trying to invent voices for them, and to have people fully fleshed out in my head and to know who can say what in the scene and who these characters are... I love it.

I like looking at the characters. Seeing them always brings up some voice or attitude. I am much more visual, and that works so much better than having someone tell me what the character is all about.

I've found that good dialogue tells you not only what people are saying or how they're communicating but it tells you a great deal - by dialect and tone, content and circumstance - about the quality of the character.

Finding the voice of a character, no matter who it is - from Black Widow to Han Solo - is the first and most important hurdle for me to cross in any work of fiction.

It's really a misconception to identify the writer with the main character, given that the author creates all the characters in the book. In certain ways, I'm every character.

Well first of all you have to make the character strong so that people can follow that. And then hopefully that character can integrate with the background of the social situation that people can recognize.

If I wrote a play with four characters every single one of them would talk like me regardless of age or sex.

I think, when I write, one of the things that I'm really attempting to do is I'm attempting to humanize my characters.

I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people.

I have tried very hard as a novelist to say, 'Novels are about individuals and especially larger than life individuals.'

I came into this business to create characters that moved people and told stories.

There are things you can say in the voice of a fictional character that you could not explore any other way.

I like writing characters that seem different from one another. So if you were to hypothetically look at a bunch of lines from books I've written, just out of context, hopefully you would be able to determine who said what. That's the goal, anyway. I try to strongly differentiate through dialogue.

Dialogue is the place that books are most alive and forge the most direct connection with readers. It is also where we as writers discover our characters and allow them to become real.