A Quote by Tayari Jones

I like straightforward names for my characters. When I get too symbolic with names or places, I start feeling like the characters and the story are less read, and I lose interest.

Tayari Jones

Quote Topics

Characters Feeling Get Interest Less Like Lose Names Places Read Start Story Straightforward Symbolic Too

Quote Author

Tayari Jones
American - Author
Born: November 30, 1970

Doing the movies and meeting the people, and I like the stories of the movies. I like names a lot, too. When I do an audition, there is a script and it has a first page that has the names of all the characters. I'm like, “Let me see that real quick, I wanna see what my name is gonna be.

Dakota Fanning

I am interested in names and what they say; it is true. I like to look at the columns of baby names in the newspapers. But I don't run out of new ones for my characters.

Ruth Rendell

I see this with experienced writers, too: They worry so much about the plot that they lose sight of the characters. They lose sight of why they are telling the story. They don't let the characters actually speak. Characters will start to dictate the story in sometimes surprising, emotional, and funny ways. If the writers are not open to those surprises, they're going to strangle the life, spark, or spirit out of their work.

Brian Michael Bendis

You could have names like Hatred; you could have names that mean something like Suffering or Poverty. So names are not just names: names have real meaning, and they tend to tell the world about the circumstances of your parents at the time that you were born.

Petina Gappah

Indian names were either characteristic nicknames given in a playful spirit, deed names, birth names, or such as have a religious and symbolic meaning.

Charles Eastman

I collect names for characters. Names are valuable; they can be your first source of insight into a character.

Spike Lee

For some reason, all my characters come to me with their names attached to them. I never have to search for the names.

Paul Auster

I'm very influenced by landscapes, not so much the way places look as the way the names sound. In this country we've got so many cultures, and the place names - the Spanish names and the Indian names, which are so incredibly musical.

Emmylou Harris

Ecclesiastes names thee Almighty, the Maccabees name thee Creator, the Epistle to the Ephesians names thee Liberty, Baruch names thee Immensity, the Psalms name thee Wisdom and Truth, John names thee Light, the Book of Kings names thee Lord, Exodus names thee Providence, Leviticus Sanctity, Esdras Justice, creation names thee God, man names thee Father; but Solomon names thee Compassion, which is the most beautiful of all thy names.

Victor Hugo

Some writers, I'm told, look for their characters' surnames in telephone directories. I don't - it seems too obvious. Or too deliberate: if you go looking for names, you're bound to find them, of course, but I've always had a superstitious hunch that the names you find by accident are always going to be better and more satisfying somehow.

Sophie Hannah

There are some characters in 'The Names' who are very much heroes and others who can only be called villains. But generally, as we get to know them, we see most of the characters are, or at least become, quite nuanced.

Peter Milligan

If you fight with big names, with legends of mixed martial arts like Alistair Overeem, Mark Hunt, like Fabricio Werdum, you will go to the highest rankings and get bigger and bigger names too.

Aleksei Oleinik

I am by nature not a list-keeper, but I do keep lists of names and add at least one or two every single day without exception. First names, last names, middle names, combinations of. I've collected more over the years than I can possibly ever use in a single lifetime, but I keep the list going nonetheless. I tell my students that it's a habit, an act of attention, that will keep them engaged, keep them thinking about characters and stories, and how that match might get made.

Jack Driscoll

I'm good at - or, rather, I like - giving names to characters.

Akira Toriyama

That's just part of being in 'X-Men.' There's, like, 20 main characters, and 15 of them are household names, so obviously you're happy for anything you can get.