Fictional Character Quotes & Sayings

Look seeker, if you love a character, you give them pain, ruin their lives, make them suffer. Maybe even throw in a heroic death! — Varric Tethras

How can one understand the inner life of a character, real or fictional, without knowing the state of her finances? — Ian McEwan

Described by Harold Bloom as "the beginning of the end of the traditional novel of social morality" (xii), George Eliot's Middlemarch is nonetheless replete with a kind of authorial intervention that modern readers might find tiresome. Readers today are accustomed to the contemporary fictional maxim of "show, don't tell" but Eliot had different aesthetic ideas, for she always tells us right away who we are dealing with. At the beginning of Middlemarch, the character of one of its protagonists, Dorothea Brooke, is laid out. Eliot writes, — George Eliot

You just like the idea of me. You like the person I present myself under circumstances that I can control. I choose what I say and how I say things. It's like being attracted to a fictional character in a book. They are scripted and made up. If you think about it, through writings, we all script and make ourselves up. I don't share the person I become when I am upset. I don't show you how I look like when I sleep. I don't tell you about all the times I've made someone cry. All the guilty things I've done and the bad thoughts I've had. — Jiawei Han

Stanley forced a smile to his lips at the memory of the onesided romance; it was silly, after all, a stupid childhood crush. Who'd fall in love with a fictional character? That was the kind of thing you laughed about as an adult. Or at least Harriet had thought so. He couldn't quite do it, though. Couldn't quite see it as a joke. It had felt too real, too raw and wild and fierce, for him to
dismiss it even now. It was love, of a sort, stunted and unformed as it was. For a time, it had kept him sane. — Amelia Mangan

The ideology of liberal humanism found expression in the earliest reviews of Hardy's writing and remained a dominant force until the explosion of literary theory in the 1980s. It is a broad and still influential category. It endorses the moral value of the individual, and the strength of the human spirit. It prefers the integrity of an organic rural society to the anonymity and materialism of an urbanised and technological world. Applied to fiction, this ideology involves the naturalisation of the novel's world and its values, and the recognition of fictional character as presenting a unified subject. — Geoffrey Harvey

You should grieve if a fictional character is killed. You should care. — George R R Martin

I populated 'The Bourne Identity' with real characters from American history, specifically characters from the Iran-Contra affair, which my father ran the investigation of. But at the heart of it was a fictional character. — Doug Liman

I think the character of Superman may be the greatest fictional creation of modern times, and working on the book is for me a sacred trust. I'm just doing my best not to disappoint! — Chris Roberson

It is only after knowing him for some time that you begin to realize you are, to him, an essentially fictional character, one he has invested with nearly limitless capacities for tragedy and comedy not because that is your true nature but because he, Richard, needs to live in a world peopled by extreme and commanding figures. — Michael Cunningham

A problem that I have with everything fictional is that writers are always having to come up with sudden artillery explosions in the middle of whatever is going on. The characters are having interesting, subtle interactions, or jealousies, or whatever it is, and suddenly some gigantic angry eruption has to happen, a giant gasp where everyone has to scramble around. That's the point where I'm turned off. I want the dynamic range to be a little smaller. I don't like the big false bangs. — Nicholson Baker

I wanted to invent myself as a fictional character. And I did, and it has caused a great deal of confusion. — Jeanette Winterson

I mean, I can do that all day long. I can tell you the Vulcan's are not actually devoid of emotion. That they work hard to suppress their emotions. And of course, there actually are no real Vulcan's, though I know the ins and outs of them as fictional characters. — Brad Warner

When you play a character, you get to see the world through their eyes. Whether it's a fictional world or a real world, you do get to see somebody else's point of view, whether he's a good guy or a bad guy. — Faran Tahir

He's a real nowhere man,
Sitting in his Nowhere Land,
Making all his nowhere plans
for nobody.
Doesn't have a point of view,
Knows not where he's going to,
Isn't he a bit like you and me? — The Beatles

Thanks to the fictional character named Fraser, in a well-loved Scottish novel, Alexander's existence on the grounds of Culloden had become its own bit of Hell. — L.L. Muir

Angry people scared me. Angry people who thought I was in charge scared me even more. — Amanda Hamm

We, people, are so very, very complicated that no matter how well drawn a fictional character is, they can't get anywhere near as complex as a real person. — Ruth Rendell

The day when you shed a tear for the death of a fictional character, you know they have become more than a character. — Ryan J. Alls

Clearly, in an infinite universe every possibility must exist, including Balzac's. Imagining Cousin Bette called her into beaing, although only potentially. The universe is merely a quantity of information; imagining a fictional character does not add to that quantity
it cannot do so by definition
but does reorganize it slightly. The Bette-ish universe has not material existence, but the initial idea in Balzac's brandy-soaked brain then spreads outwards: not only to those who read his books, but also, by implication, backwards and forwards. Imagining Cousin Bette also creates, in potential, her ancestors and descendants, friends, enemies, acquaintances, her thoughts and actions and those of everybody else in her universe. — Iain Pears

I've thought a lot about the power of empathy. In my work, it's the current that connects me and my actual pulse to a fictional character in a made up story, it allows me to feel, pretend feelings and sorrows and imagined pain. — Meryl Streep

I quote fictional characters, because I'm a fictional character myself! — Carrie Fisher

No matter how much restitution she paid with every word and deed, her blood-stained hands could never really be clean, even if no one else knew they were dirty. — Stacy Hawkins Adams

I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation. — Penelope Lively

The twenty-first chapter gives the novel the quality of genuine fiction, an art founded on the principle that human beings change. There is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character or characters. Even trashy bestsellers show people changing. When a fictional work fails to show change, when it merely indicates that human character is set, stony, unregenerable, then you are out of the field of the novel and into that of the fable or the allegory. — Anthony Burgess

To create a character who really interests you, try combining aspects of your favourite fictional character with a real person. — Caroline Lawrence

As you read deeper into the novel, you must modify your representations of the folk psychological representations that each character has. But since the metarepresentational load here increases dramatically with the complexity of the portrayal of the characters and their relationships to one another, it is no surprise that even partial expertise typically involves knowing how to find one's way about in the novel. It involves knowing how to locate and identify the folk psychological representations that respective characters have, and the signs of these in the novel itself. Here the representations that are the object of your own representations are located somewhere other than in your own head. In short, this understanding involves constructing a representational loop that extends beyond the head and into the minds of the fictional characters - and perhaps the narrator or even the author - with which you are engaged. — Robert Andrew Wilson

Hundreds of thousands of people live in my library. Some are real, others are fictional. The real ones are the so-called imaginary characters in works of literature, the fictional ones are their authors. We know everything about the former, or at least as much as we are meant to know, everything that is written about a given character in a novel, a story or a poem in which she or he figures ... The rest doesn't matter. Nothing is hidden from us. For us, a novel's characters are real. (p. 80 — Jacques Bonnet

Humanity has this need to hear stories because they connect us with other people, they teach us about our own feelings. We feel less lonely when we see other people going through the same things, even if they're fictional characters. — Isabel Allende

Exquisitely embroidered tapestries lined the walls of Medb's bedroom, but their impact was somewhat reduced by the room's ambience. A musky odor with pungent accents of stale piss. — David H. Millar

The world is full of fictional characters looking for their stories — Diane Arbus

The thing about great fictional characters from literature, and the reason that they're constantly turned into characters in movies, is that they completely speak to what makes people human. They're full of flaws as much as they are full of heroics. I think the reason that people love them and hate them so much is because, in some way, they always see a mirror of themselves in them, and you can always understand them on some level. Sometimes it's a terrifyingly dark mirror that's held up. — Keira Knightley

On some deep, unconscious level, he had always known it to be true. He was an invention, a fictional character. Jacob Lightfoot didn't exist. — Sharon Sant

With Marvel and DC, you're working with their pre-established fictional universes and characters. At those places, you're working with characters who will outlive you and maybe your children and your childern's children. Batman will outlive me, Spider-Man will outlive me, the Avengers will outlive me, and so it goes. — Grant Morrison

Does talking to yourself in the voice of your fictional character count as being social? — Michelle M. Pillow

I research the role, and if it's a literary character, I read the book, and if it's an historical figure, I research documents and biographies. If it's a fictional character, I work off the script. — Luke Evans

The proverb, "Where there's a will.." sums it up for a writer who had just started in his writing life; for himself, the fictional characters and the audience of his works. It's a trinity of perspectives; one of his struggle, another of the story character which he writes about and the last one of the reader's expectation of his protagonists. — Lucas Michael

Eliot was scornful of idle women readers who imagined themselves the heroines of French novels, and of self-regarding folk who saw themselves in the most admirable character in a novel, and she hoped for more nuanced engagement from her own readers. Even so, all readers make books over in their own image, and according to their own experience. — Rebecca Mead

Fictional characters exist in only two places, neither of which is on the printed page. They exist, first, in the mind of the writer and, second, in the mind of the reader. — Maren Elwood

We are living in a post-fictional era. Fictional governments are accepted without comment, and we can sit in a mosque and have a debate about the fictional port a fictional character consumes in a video game, with every gravity we would accord something quite real. — G. Willow Wilson

But I assure you, a government that is willing to put their own children in danger, their own future, just to see their potential, is twisted. We do not grab babies, newborns, and throw them out of windows just to see if they sprout wings. — S. Elizabeth Dover

As far as I am concerned, Don Quixote is the most metal fictional character that I know. Single handed, he is trying to change the world, regardless of any personal consequences. — Christopher Lee

The world is a stage we walk upon. We are all in a way fictional characters who write ourselves with our beliefs. — Louis Theroux

I'd rather feel empathy for a character that's fictional, so it doesn't quite tie into personal experience as much. — Henry Cavill

We are talking about someone who has lived. It must be honored in every respect. The fictional can take any kind of channel - according to the actor's marriage to the character. — Kate Mulgrew

I don't really distinguish between a fictional hero and a real life hero as a basis for any comparison. To me, a hero is a hero. I like making pictures about people who have a personal mission in life or at least in the life of a story who start out with certain low expectations and then over achieve our highest expectations for them. That's the kind of character arc I love dabbling in as a director, as a filmmaker. — Steven Spielberg

Mr Bott sits down and gestures gracefully to the board. "As you are clearly both fascinated by this text, would you like to explain the significance of Laertes in Hamlet?" He looks at Alexa. "Please go first, Miss Roberts."
"Well ... " Alexa says hesitantly. "He's Ophelia's brother, right?"
"I didn't ask for his family tree, Alexa. I want to know his literary significance as a fictional character."
Alexa looks uncomfortable. "Well then, his literary significance is in being Ophelia's brother, isn't it? So she has someone to hang out with."
"How very kind of Shakespeare to give fictional Ophelia a fictional playmate so that she doesn't get fictionally bored. Your analytical skills astound me, Alexa. Perhaps I should send you to Set Seven with Mrs White and you can spend the rest of the lesson studying Thomas the Tank Engine. I believe he has lots of buddies too. — Holly Smale

We all learn, whether consciously or not, that the default interpretation of behavior reflects a character's state of mind, and every fictional story that we read reinforces our tendency to make that kind of interpretation first. — Lisa Zunshine

It's certainly easy for me to make a fictional character mad about something. I can get them angry about something that I'm relatively indifferent about, just because I'm not educated on it, if I go to someone who is educated about it and is passionate about it. I find a point of fiction and then give it to them. — Aaron Sorkin

In every film, whether it's a fictional character or not, you create an idea of the character and for me I always do a bad impersonation to start with. — Joaquin Phoenix

That wasn't love; that was stupidity. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Pure, perfect sorrow is as impossible as pure and perfect joy. — Leo Tolstoy

I'd said to them that when we read fiction, we pour our own paricular store of emotions - say, the sense of loss we feel for those disappeared from our lives - into the characters set before us. We take the few words with which the writer sketches these characters, the thing he said, the pain she felt, where they were, and our own emotional stockpile magically creates people. As the human eye fleshes out the pixilated image. Fictional characters are highly sophiticated Rorschach blots, and we, along with their author, are their authors. When you read a fictional character, you too are creating her. — Chandler Burr

Bravery in a fictional character is one thing
it's easy to imagine and easy to write. Bravery in real life offers many challenges. We want to believe we will be brave if a situation requires us to. But if we over-think it, we will certainly fail. One simply needs to act toward the best possible result rather than to ponder all of the possibilities. — Susan Wingate

What good would learning be if we concentrated on what we already knew? It is only by learning those things that come to us with difficulty that we truly gain wisdom. — Kate Klimo

I am no longer going to become a fictional character to please people. That's too much work. — Lauryn Hill

If people ever look down upon you for crying for fictional characters, you should give them a gentle, pitying look and feel bad for them. If they've never cried for a fictional character, then they've never loved one (and what a joy that is). If they've never cried at a book, a movie, a piece of music, then they've missed one of the great pleasures life has to offer. Just because fiction does not contain things that are real doesn't mean it doesn't contain truth, and we find it through the alchemy of our tears. — Cassandra Clare

The case against intellect is founded on a set of fictional and wholly abstract antagonisms. Intellect is pitted against feeling, on the ground that it is somehow inconsistent with warm emotion. It is pitted against character, because it is widely believed that intellect stands for mere cleverness, which transmutes easily into the sly and diabolical. It is pitted against practicality, since theory is held to be opposed to practice. It is pitted against democracy, since intellect is felt to be a form of distinction that defies egalitarianism ... . Once the validity of these antagonisms is accepted, then the case for intellect ... is lost. — Charles P. Pierce

Gayness is built into Batman. I'm not using gay in the pejorative sense, but Batman is very, very gay. There's just no denying it. Obviously as a fictional character he's intended to be heterosexual, but the basis of the whole concept is utterly gay. — Grant Morrison

(from his random observations after reading David Copperfield by Charles Dickens)
In the Old Curiosity Shop I discovered that in the character of Dick Swiveller, Dickens provided P.G. Wodehouse with pretty much the whole of his oeuvre. In David Copperfield, David's bosses Spenlow and Jorkins are what must be the earliest fictional representations of good cop/bad cop. — Nick Hornby

Perhaps teenagers don't interest me as much as children do since I still feel (even at 58) to be a fairly adolescent personality, especially in my enthusiasms, and I find myself an uninteresting fictional character. — Scott Bradfield

She felt like a fictional character who'd escaped the book in which her creator had carefully and kindly trapped her, taken a pair of scissors to her outline and leaped, free ... — Kate Morton

I try to make the readers feel they've lived the events of the book. Just as you grieve if a friend is killed, you should grieve if a fictional character is killed. You should care. If somebody dies and you just go get more popcorn, it's a superficial experience isn't it? — George R R Martin

I don't think I ever relinquish a person I have known, and surely not my fictional characters. I see them, I hear them, with a clarity that I would call hallucinatory if hallucination didn't mean something else ... A character whom we create can never die, any more than a friend can die ... Through [my characters] I've lived many parallel lives. — Marguerite Yourcenar

What's a horse doing on a spaceship"
"What's pre-revolutionary France doing on a spaceship? Mickey, get a little perspective!"
Dr. Who "The Girl In The Fireplace — Stephen Moffat

One of the things that makes characters real is details. Life offers a lot of details. You just have to choose and use them wisely. When you give them to fictional people and a fictional story, their purpose and their meaning changes, so it's best to see the version in the book as fiction entirely, wherever it started out. — Nick Earls

Writers are magpies, and we collect details about people and we use them for fictional characters. — Caroline Leavitt

How sad that I felt more of a connection to a fictional character than to a guy in real life. — Allison Van Diepen

Seriously, a thirty-something woman shouldn't be daydreaming about a fictional character in a two-hundred-year-old world to the point where it interfered with her very real and much more important life and relationships. Of course she shouldn't. — Shannon Hale

But people do the same thing with the Bible. They memorize all the fictional characters, the parameters and the rules of the game and think it's important, but I can't get excited about that myself. — Brad Warner

Perhaps this is what Henry James meant when he talked about the "irresponsibility" of characters. Characters are irresponsible, art is irresponsible when compared to life, because it is first and foremost important that a character be real, and as readers or watchers we tend to applaud any effort made towards the construction of that reality. We do not, of course, indulge actual people in the world this way at all. In real life, the fact that something seems real to someone is not enough to interest us, or to convince us that that reality is interesting. But the self-reality of fictional characters is deeply engrossing, which is why villains are lovable in literature in ways that they are not in life. — James Wood

I don't think there is a fictional character who resembles me because fictional characters are not real! — Ruth Rendell

I'm a blank canvas that I can paint however I desire. For the first time ever, I get to be the character in my own fantasy land. — E.K. Blair

I put a lot of effort in creating something fictional, yet very personal, because Shook is a defining part of me and my music: the Shook entity is much like the Batman or Superman comics characters. I like the idea that I can have this image that represents a part of me, but isn't really me, kind of like an alter ego. — Shook

Pale hair fell in waves to his shoulders, framing a face mortal females considered a sensual feast. They didn't know the man was actually a devil in angel's skin. They should have, though. He practically glowed with irreverence, and there was an unholy gleam in his green eyes that proclaimed he would laugh in your face while cutting out your heat. Or laugh in your face while you cut out his heart. — Gena Showalter

Now that I no longer feel lonely, and now that my own past feels resolved in a whole new and very deep way, I am excited to write about the real world, to stay in it. Fiction is an escape, a parallel life, and it was a powerful source of comfort for me when my own life was raw and uncomfortable. I don't feel the burning need to disappear into a fictional character these days. — Kate Christensen

I've never dated a fictional character before. The closest I ever came was an Italian. — Woody Allen

The characters tell their story - I am merely the tool used to record it — Marti Melville

She was returning home to be the wife of, mother of, First Lady of, but what did that really mean? — Stacy Hawkins Adams

The flimsy little protestations that mark the front gate of every novel, the solemn statements that any resemblance to real persons living or dead is entirely coincidental, are fraudulent every time. A writer has no other material to make his people from than the people of his experience ... The only thing the writer can do is to recombine parts, suppress some characterisitics and emphasize others, put two or three people into one fictional character, and pray the real-life prototypes won't sue. — Wallace Stegner

Every fictional character is real, they just inherit a different world. — Daniel Schwabauer

So my character on 'Tyrant' is a chap called Barry Al Fayeed, and he is the second son of a fictional Middle Eastern dictator. But, he has grown up since he was young in America. He's trained as a doctor. He's married a beautiful American girl, had two kids, so he's very much an American. — Adam Rayner

Why do we insist on being the carpenters of our own crosses? — John Zunski

How does one go about getting an introduction to a fictional character? — Richard Bruce Nugent

I love playing real people. It's a huge challenge and responsibility which I take on board and which I relish. It also scares me to death. Give me a totally fictional character and I don't have the same sort of responsibility. If, though, I play Sigmund Freud or Robert Maxwell or whoever then there is a responsibility. — David Suchet

The world tends toward chaos, you know, Cassidy said. You could too. Just write down a made up name, or even a fictional character. And the next person who finds this geocache, it's as though things really hapened that way. You have to at least allow for the possibility of it. — Robyn Schneider

A writer often wants to change a reader's perception about the world, which is a political act. But we have to work through character, so helping the reader to feel close to fictional characters is the gate through which we have to usher the reader. — Caryl Phillips

It's more difficult playing a real-life person than a fictional character - you can go easy on yourself with a fictional character. — Christian McKay

I am Captain James Hook! I am no victim; I create them! I do not have bad dreams; I inspire them! — Heidi Schulz

When you play a real person, you feel a sense of responsibility that obviously you don't feel when you're playing a fictional character. — Natalie Dormer

True, I'd never met him. And true, he was a fictional character. But he also was what people needed him to be: a dashing hero, and articulate peacemaker, a cunning excape artist. — Jodi Picoult

I have a rule: I will not alter the basic history of a real-life character to suit our fictional needs in a big way. — Terence Winter

Kierkegaard gives us some portrait sketches of the styles of denying possibility, or the lies of character-which is the same thing. He is intent on describing what we today call "inauthentic" men, men who avoid developing their own uniqueness; they follow out the styles of automatic and uncritical living in which they were conditioned as children. They are "inauthentic" in that they do not belong to themselves, are not "their own" person, do not act from their own center, do not see reality on its terms; they are the one-dimensional men totally immersed in the fictional games being played in their society, unable to transcend their social conditioning: the corporation men in the West, the bureaucrats in the East, the tribal men locked up in tradition-man everywhere who doesn't understand what it means to think for himself and who, if he did, would shrink back at the idea of such audacity and exposure. — Ernest Becker

I'm trying to listen to my past, listen to what's most deeply going on inside myself, my creative set of fictional characters, a fictional world - to listen to that world, to search. — Frederick Buechner

Living in that castle was like being condemned to Hell before I'd even had the opportunity to sin. — Kristen Reed

There is no cure for fictional character love, but the plus side is that it is an entirely benign disease with no bad side effects. — Cassandra Clare

The best boyfriends are the ones in books. — Leah Blundell

The fictional character with whom I most profoundly identified was Yossarian in Catch-22. Always did, still do. — Neil Cross

Indy Rivers got things done. Maybe she was a fictional character, but they were in a fictional place, in a fictional situation. There were worse things to be than fictional. — Mira Grant

As in the universe every atom has an effect, however miniscule, on every other atom, so that to pinch the fabric of Time and Space at any point is to shake the whole length and breadth of it, so that to change a character's name from Jane to Cynthia is to make the fictional ground shudder under her feet. — John Gardner