Male Protagonists Quotes

Romance writers and readers have one thing in common: We love men.

Plot is a framework on which to drape other things. So once that's working, I can just let it go and do all the stuff that I love - 'Trojan horse' it. There are so many great YA heroines, and that's fantastic, but what about the emotionally complex boy out there? That's who I tend to write about.

I've been playing with this idea in my mind that the hero's journey that we're all taught as screenwriters may resonate more specifically for male protagonists and maybe even male viewers.

I grew up not really seeing a lot of leads in the industry that weren't like - and I look up to these people - but like Ryan Gosling and Christian Bale.

Guys play characters that won't grow up and something catastrophic happens and they have to grow up to save the day - that's pretty much what today's comedy is about.

People focus on the darker female characters in my books, but for every one of those, I can also show you an equally screwed up man that no one ever comments about, or a nicer woman that no one comments about. I don't feel like that's my specialty.

That's my main complaint with Murakami: that he writes these complex males and then really static women.

I write about the men you want to read about but don't necessarily want to be married to.

As a girl, you're supposed to love Sleeping Beauty. I mean, who wants to love Sleeping Beauty when you can be Aladdin?

If someone were to come from another planet and see the world through movies, they'd think that the world was populated by white men in their 30s who shoot a lot.

The baseline character in a lot of Western literature is a man. So we, as women, do a lot of suspending of our disbelief to experience a novel or a play or a movie through that male character.

I'm trying to bring a real man back to Hollywood.

As a successful romantic novelist - one of my publishers is Mills & Boon - I create the sort of male heroes that no woman could fail to adore and few real men could hope to emulate.

I've written a couple of scripts. Actually, a pilot. I'm not sure I'm allowed to say, but it's a comedy about three young men in New York City, one of whom may or may not be a romantic like me.

If you came from Mars and tried to analyse British or American society through novels, you'd think our society was preponderantly full of middle-aged, slightly alcoholic, middle-class, intellectual men, most of whom are divorced from their families and have nothing to do with children.

Most parts in comedy, they're not really written for men. They're written for, like, these boy-men.

I've grown up well, partly because there weren't great girls' literature - Nancy Drew, maybe - but there weren't things. So there was Huck Finn and "Spin And Marty." The boys characters were interesting and you lived through them when you're watching it.

I get a stack of scripts, like, once a month, and most of the time, you find these placeholder girls that are there to provide a bounce for the male character. So we know he's funny because she's serious and she's mad at him. We know he's strong because she needs saving. So really, her job is to validate this personality trait of our hero or male.

The kind of roles that Harrison Ford plays are what really interest me, like 'Indiana Jones' and 'Raiders of the Lost Ark.'

I think as women we've always been very used to growing up reading and identifying with male protagonists, especially in fantasy. There's a saying in publishing that girls will read about boys, but boys will only read about boys, and it's important to give women strong heroines.

In male-driven [films], the protagonist is not the person who's necessarily in harms way. There's a sense that they're going to figure out how to persevere and take on the obstacles and foes and you don't necessarily know if that's going to happen with the subjects of love stories.

This act of empathy, that women go through from the time we're little girls - we read all of literature, all of history, it's really about boys, most of it. But I can feel more like Peter Pan than Tinker Bell, or like Wendy. I wanted to be Tom Sawyer, not Becky. And we're so used to that act of empathizing with the protagonist of a male-driven plot. I mean, that's what we've done all our lives. You read history, you read great literature, Shakespeare, it's all fellas, you know?

Seminaked men!” Jacky trilled. “With swords,” Kat purred. “It is a romance novel!