A Quote by W. E. B. Griffin

An author's characters do what he wants them to do.

W. E. B. Griffin

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Author Characters Them Wants

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W. E. B. Griffin
American - Writer
Born: November 10, 1929

Our life is a book that writes itself and whose principal themes sometimes escape us. We are like characters in a novel who do not always understand what the author wants of them.

Julien Green

I think even the characters that are fundamentally evil and wrong, I want people to really love them. I think that's important to writing believable characters. They don't have to be likable but they have to be loved, at least by the author.

Mark Russell

But I have seen my obstacles: trivialities, learning and poetry. This last needs explaining: the old artist's readiness to dissolve characters into a haze. Characters cannot come alive and fight and guide the world unless the novelist wants them to remain characters.

E. M. Forster

A character is never the author who created him. It is quite likely, however, that an author may be all his characters simultaneously.

Albert Camus

There's always a slight tension when you sell a book to Hollywood, especially a nonfiction book. The author wants his story told intact; the nonfiction author wants it told accurately.

Bryan Burrough

Writing is transmogrifying, not just for the reader but also for the author; an author becomes someone he or she isn't by living the lives of his or her characters.

Robert J. Sawyer

For an author, the nice characters aren't much fun. What you want are the screwed up characters. You know, the characters that are constantly wondering if what they are doing is the right thing, characters that are not only screwed up but are self-tapping screws. They're doing it for themselves.

Terry Pratchett

It is always a tense moment for an author to see how someone hasillustrated his or her story, because the author has lived for so long with these characters, sometimes for years.

Pat Mora

The stories I love the most are where the author has a lot of empathy for everyone. The author loves their characters and takes their situations really seriously, and you feel like you're just dropped into a different world.

Molly Antopol

There is no obligation for the author of a film to believe in, or to sympathise with, the moral behaviour of his characters. Nor is he necessarily to be accredited with the same opinions as his characters. Nor is it necessary or obligatory for him to believe in the tenet of his construction - all of which is a disclaimer to the notion that the author of Drowning by Numbers believes that all men are weak, enfeebled, loutish, boorish and generally inadequate and incompetent as partners for women. But it's a thought.

Peter Greenaway

But to be perfectly frank, this childish idea that the author of a novel has some special insight into the characters in the novel ... it's ridiculous. That novel was composed of scratches on a page, dear. The characters inhabiting it have no life outside of those scratches. What happened to them? They all ceased to exist the moment the novel ended.

John Green

There's this creative thing in me that wants to have my work used - like the author of a book who wants it read.

James Goodnight

I can't inhabit my characters until I know what kind of work they do. This requires research because my jobs for the last decade have been author and professor, and I'd like to spare the world more author or professor novels.

Victor LaValle

Being an author means, almost by definition, that you make up characters and then complicate their lives. That's it, really. You make up characters and give them problem after problem after problem.

Maureen Johnson

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.

Luigi Pirandello

Fiction should be about moral dilemmas that are so bloody difficult that the author doesn't know the answer. What I hate in fiction is when the author knows better than the characters what they should do.

Pat Barker

A Quote by W. E. B. Griffin

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