#characters

A Dickens character to me is a theatrical projection of a character. Not that it isn't real. It's real, but in that removed sense. But Sherlock Holmes is simply there. I would be astonished if I went to 221 1/2 B Baker Street and didn't find him." [An Invitation to Learning, January 1942] ↗

— Rex Stout

#dickens #larger-than-life #novels #presence #realism

Jack sprung to his feet out of reach. "I'd prefer to finish this intact. " "My apologies,” Cabal said, grinning viciously. "l keep forgetting, you're only human." His smile softened to full amusement as Jack raised his sword in challenge. "Human or not," Jack said as he slowly approached him. "I carry the advantage of unworldly knowledge. " " Is that what you're doing?" Cabal laughed; "Something unworldly?" "I have a vast library of knowledge inside my head from my homeland." "What knowledge could your world offer that would be useful here?" "How about a toilet?" Jack winked at Nicole. “Perhaps you should build one and leave us all in awe.” Cabal declared. “People could call them ‘Jacks’ for short.” Nicole added to the conversation. ↗

— Alaina Stanford

#adventure #erotica #humor #loss #love

I don’t know why Kate was trying to impress him, as far as I could see the guy had all the allure and social grace of a psychotic slug with halitosis and a bad head cold. ↗

— Sharon Sant

#humour #quirky-characters #romantic-comedy #sisters #ya

Our relationship with literary characters, at least to those that exercise a certain attraction over us, rests in fact on a denial. We know perfectly well, on a conscious level, that these characters “do not exist,” or in any case do not exist in the same way as do the inhabitants of the real world. But things manifest in an entirely different way on the unconscious level, which is interested not in the ontological differences between worlds but in the effect they produce on the psyche. Every psychoanalyst knows how deeply a subject can be influenced, and even shaped, sometimes to the point of tragedy, by a fictional character and the sense of identification it gives rise to. This remark must first of all be understood as a reminder that we ourselves are usually fictional characters for other people […] ↗

— Pierre Bayard

#detective-criticism #fiction #psychology #reading #sherlock-holmes

I don't try and write strong female characters or strong male characters, I just try and write, hopefully, strong characters and sometimes they happen to be female. ↗

— J. J. Abrams

#female #happen #hopefully #i #just

One of my favorite things about 'Star Trek' wasn't just the overt banter but the humor in that show about the relationships between the main characters and their reactions to the situations they would face; there was a lot of comedy in that show without ever breaking its reality. ↗

— J. J. Abrams

#between #breaking #characters #comedy #ever

You can fake your age or mask it, but the passion that moves the characters has to be real. ↗

— Victoria Abril

#be real #characters #fake #mask #moves

Once a novel gets going and I know it is viable, I don't then worry about plot or themes. These things will come in almost automatically because the characters are now pulling the story. ↗

— Chinua Achebe

#almost #automatically #because #characters #come

I find interesting characters or lessons that resonate with people and sometimes I write about them in the sports pages, sometimes I write them in a column, sometimes in a novel, sometimes a play or sometimes in nonfiction. But at the core I always say to myself, 'Is there a story here? Is this something people want to read?' ↗

— Mitch Albom

#always #characters #column #core #find

Whenever you have two characters in a book, whether it's a novel or nonfiction, you run the risk that the reader is going to like one more than the other. They're going to read one chapter and say, 'I can't wait to get back to the other guy.' ↗

— Mitch Albom

#book #chapter #characters #get #going