#characterization

Authors can write stories without people assuming that they are autobiographies, but songwriters and poets are often considered to be the characters in their works. I like Michelangelo's vision, 'I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free. ↗

— Criss Jami

#art #artist #author #autobiography #character

Over the years I have forged intimate familial ties with these characters, who are reflections of a portion of myself. Consequently, even a character who appeared only once in a short story waits now in the wings, concealed by the curtain, for his next appearance on-stage. Not one of them has ever broken free of his familial ties with me and disappeared for ever - at least, not within the confines of my heart. ↗

— Shūsaku Endō

#characters #fiction #writing #family

Maugham's success, in fact, lies a good deal less in what he positively does than in what he discreetly leaves undone. He gets the colors of life into his Charles Strickland, not by playing a powerful beam of light upon him, but by leaving him a bit out of focus--by constantly insisting, in the midst of every discussion of him, upon his pervasive mystery--in brief, by craftily making him appear, not as a commonplace, simple and completely understandable man, but as the half comprehended enigma that every genuine man of genius seems to all of us when we meet him in real life. ↗

— H.L. Mencken

#geniuses #life

A good American makes propaganda for whatever existence has forced him to become. ↗

— Saul Bellow

#characterization #propaganda

When the drama attains a characterization which makes the play a revelation of human conduct and a dialogue which characterizes yet pleases for itself, we reach dramatic literature. ↗

— George P. Baker

#characterization #characterizes #conduct #dialogue #drama

The instinct to impersonate produces the actor; the desire to provide pleasure by impersonations produces the playwright; the desire to provide this pleasure with adequate characterization and dialogue memorable in itself produces dramatic literature. ↗

— George P. Baker

#adequate #characterization #desire #dialogue #dramatic

I just adore Kate Winslet. I love her because you're never aware of all the stuff that's going into her characterization and, yet, she completely transforms. ↗

— Anna Torv

#aware #because #characterization #completely #going

An attempt to write nothing but characterization will soon bog down; I for one don't want to have somebody tell me about someone else. ↗

— Daniel Keys Moran

#attempt #characterization #down #else #i

Favoring 'resolution' the way we do, it is hard for us men to write great love stories. Why?, because we want to tell too much. We aren’t satisfied unless at the end of the story the characters are lying there, panting. ↗

— Roman Payne

#feminism #fiction #literary-theory #making-love #panting

The way she looks right now, you have to think about multiple car pile-ups. Imagine two bloodmobiles colliding head on. The way she looks, you'd have to think of mass graves to even log thirty seconds in the saddle. Think of spoiled cat food and ulcerated cankers and expired donor organs. That's how beautiful she looks. ↗

— Chuck Palahniuk

#beauty