Quotes & Sayings About Fictional Characters

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

I can't help but think that it's an unfortunate custom to name children after people who come to sticky ends. Even if they are fictional characters, it doesn't bode well for the poor things. There are too many Judes and Tesses and Clarissas and Cordelias around. If we must name our children after literary figures then we should search out happy ones, although it's true they are much harder to find. — Kate Atkinson

My characters are fictional. I get ideas from real people, sometimes, but my characters always exist only in my head. — S.E. Hinton

Even fictional characters sometimes receive unwarranted medical opinions. Doctors have diagnosed Ebenezer Scrooge with OCD, Sherlock Holmes with autism, and Darth Vader with borderline personality disorder. — Sam Kean

By appealing to his imagination, a pornographic novel brings the reader's body into play; libertine fiction appeals only to his mind. The goal of the former is erotic pleasure, or rather the desire to experience erotic pleasure, which the pornographic novel, obviously, cannot satisfy by itself. It is in this regard merely an intermediary, a stimulant, a kind of literary pimp.

With libertine fiction, the goal is that of overcoming the prejudices of some of the characters, which are assumed to be the same as those of the reader. The reader is somewhat the equivalent of the fictional object of seduction. — Jean-Marie Goulemot

Amanda herself couldn't understand why her writing was so different from her own personality. Her pen seemed to take on a life of its own when she sat before a sheaf of blank parchment paper. She wrote about characters unlike any people she had ever known... sometimes violent, brutal, always passionate; some who came to ruin and some who even triumphed in spite of their own lack of morality. Since she had no actual pattern on which to base these fictional characters, Amanda realized that their feelings, their passions, could only have come from inside herself. — Lisa Kleypas

I do believe that characters in novels belong to their writers and their readers pretty equally. I've learned a lot of things about the characters I write from people who read about them. Readers expand them in ways I don't think of and take them to places I can't go. — Ann Brashares

Is the writer cruel that makes his characters suffer only to bring them to triumph or tragedy in the end? — Johnny Rich

The characters in my stories, whether historical or fictional, usually prove to be a compilation of influences taken from differing sources, but never drawn from one model. — Thomas Steinbeck

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 a fictional invention grows according to its own development, not the author's. Characters in fiction are not simply as alive as you and me, they are more alive. Becky Sharp, Elizabeth Bennett, and Don Quixote may not outlive the burning out of the sun, but they will certainly outlive the brief candle of our lives. — Cynthia Ozick

There are no such things as fictional characters. — Matthew Quick

Sometimes, authors' descriptions of unique fictional characters are like mirrors that reflect the readers image back. — Ben Abix

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 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

I think everybody goes through changes, and the same should be said for fictional characters, especially ones that you follow on television. — Peter Dinklage

We only reveal what we want other people to know, right? It's like we create fictional characters for the public. And inside we're somebody totally different. — Matt De La Pena

As a historian, I found myself all too often treating my historical subjects like fictional characters, malleable entities that could be made to do one thing or another, whose motivations could be speculated upon endlessly, and whose missing actions could be reconstructed and approximated based on assessments of prior and later behaviors. It was one of the hazards with working a fragmentary source base. You had little scraps, like puzzle pieces, and you could put them together as best you could. But no matter how faithful you tried to be to the historical record, there would always be that element of guesswork, of imagination, of (if we're being totally honest) fiction. — Lauren Willig

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

I take writing very seriously. There's a lot of responsibility in putting blood in the veins of fictional characters. — Brooklyn Hudson

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

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

If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats. — Richard Bach

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

I believed in fictional characters as if they were a part of real life. Poetry was important, too. My parents had memorized poems from their days attending school in New York City and loved reciting them. We all enjoyed listening to these poems and to music as well. — Alice McDermott

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

This was during a period in my reading life when I was given to understand that "relating" to the fictional characters or situation was of prime importance, and so I read, I'm sorry to say, narrowly, frugally, unadventurously, as though I had no interest in the greater world and no desire to experience other cycles of thinking and being. This idea of "relating", or identifying, was encouraged by my teachers and even, I believe, by the critical theories of the day. Naive as it may sound, one read fiction in order to confirm the reality of one's experience. — Carol Shields

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

Sometimes people who look different from you are scary. Maybe they are ugly. Maybe they are loud. Maybe they
are big. Maybe they are green. Maybe they are all those things. But you should not be afraid of them just because of how they look. You may find they are nice to you if you are
nice to them. — Jeff Hutchins

The language fictional characters use is chosen for effect, at least if the author is concentrating. — John M. Ford

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

I laughed. It was just like Owen to make excuses for someone else's shortcomings. Even fictional characters. Owen found my tendency to speak my mind "refreshingly honest," and hailed Marc's temper as "a deep protective instinct." He said Ethan "thoroughly enjoyed life," and that Parker "really knew how to have a good time." According to Owen, we were all doing just fine, and all was right with the world. — Rachel Vincent

Heavy is the head that holds the pen of creation. We construct these characters from nothing, molding them from our imaginations. We give them hopes and dreams and unique personalities until they feel so real you're mind believes it must be so. We watch them grow by our hands, not always knowing the paths they will choose with the obstacles we throw at them. They take on a life of their own and often surprise even us by their actions we couldn't have imagined before it poured out of us onto the paper. We could change it if we really wanted to, but it would be forced and not be true to the characters. And when something tragic happens and one is lost, we feel that loss even though we know they were not a friend, a family member or even ourselves. It can be a hard thing to voice sometimes, to give tribute to the one's left behind with the real sadness over something not so real. But we find the words and press on to the next challenge, because that's what good writers do. — Jennifer A. Marsh

It is always sad to write about prejudice, but sometimes when we see it being played out in the lives of fictional characters, we can recognize it in our own lives. — Katherine Paterson

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

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

I feel like these characters, these places, these beings and plots, and even these inanimate objects are counting on me for survival. It's my responsibility to reveal them to the world, to show my readers the names of these things, to show them their histories and stories. — Nicholas Trandahl

A good novel, one which entices the author as much as it beckons the reader. — W.J. Raymond

All the characters in my book are fictional, but every single one of them was inspired by someone I knew and loved who didn't make it out. I wanted to bring them back to life and so, I wrote a book about them. — Sanela Ramic Jurich

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

Fictional characters also evolve, the way human being do in real life. — Saumya Kaushik...

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

Readers of novels often fall into the bad habit of being overly exacting about the characters' moral flaws. They apply to these fictional beings standards that no one they know in real life could possibly meet. — Edmund White

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

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

Neither is a memoir the same as a biography, which aims for the most objective, factual account of a life. A memoir, as I understand it, makes no pretense of denying its subjectivity. Its matter is one person's memory, and memory by nature is selective and colored by emotion. Others who participated in the events I describe will no doubt remember some details differently, though I hope we would agree on the essential truths. I have taken no liberties with the past as I remember it, used no fictional devices beyond reconstructing conversations from memory. I have not blended characters, or bent chronology to convenience. And yet I have tried to tell a good story. — Sonia Sotomayor

All the characters in this book are fictional, but they are as real to me as the members of my own family. I had to tell their story because they could not. — Maral Boyadjian

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

What all that means is that readers fundamentally want to feel something, not about your story, but about themselves. They want to play. They want to anticipate, guess, think, and judge. They want to finish a story and feel competent. They want to feel like they've been through something. They want to connect with your characters and live their fictional experience, or believe that they have. Creating — Donald Maass

For four days straights, I sit at my typewriter in my bedroom. Twenty of my typed pages, full of slashes and red-circled edits, become thirty-one in thick Strathmore white. — Kathryn Stockett

No more movie references. No more fictional characters to relate to. This was real. It was destiny. I was ... a thing, a commodity. — C.J. Roberts

Fictions are realities we don't think of, that are happening to people we know nothing about. — Sanhita Baruah

What does it say about me that I'm jealous of the lives of fictional characters? — Alyssa Goodnight

Much of the joy in falling in love with fictional characters comes from being able to envision new stories from them. — The Atlantic Monthly

If the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictions. — Jorge Luis Borges

Nerd Girl Problem # 235
That unexplainable crush you have on fictional characters. — Ella Frank

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

Oh god, Anabeth," Ellie muttered. "Your whole life is based around sex." "So?" she shot back. "It's better than having sex with fictional characters!" Ellie shot up out of my desk chair. "I do not have sex with fictional characters!" "Oh puh-lease, I've seen the books you read, all big muscley men and virginal women and steamy sex. Why else would you read that crap if not to get off? — Madeline Sheehan

One likes to think that there is some fantastic limbo for the children of imagination, some strange, impossible place where the beaux of Fielding may still make love to the belles of Richardson, where Scott's heroes still may strut, Dickens's delightful Cockneys still raise a laugh, and Thackeray's worldlings continue to carry on their reprehensible careers. Perhaps in some humble corner of such a Valhalla, Sherlock and his Watson may for a time find a place, while some more astute sleuth with some even less astute comrade may fill the stage which they have vacated. — Arthur Conan Doyle

Whoa, I've really got to stop making plans with fictional characters. It can't be healthy to develop relationships with people who don't exist. — Chris Colfer

Didn't Notai ships usually have long names? Like Ineluctable Ascendancy of Mind Unfolding or The Finite Contains the Infinite Contains the Finite? Both of those ship names were fictional, characters in more or less famous melodramatic entertainments. — Ann Leckie

I have played Blair Cramer for 20 years, I feel a personal investment in the success of 'One Life to Live.' I love the show, I'm a fan of the characters, and I have invested in the journey these fictional characters have traveled. — Kassie DePaiva

Star Wars was a total piece of shit that had spawned billions of dollars in merchandise and sequels and books and games and pajama bottoms. It was an infinite reservoir, it was an endless void. It was responsible for a cornucopia of made up words like Jedi, the Force and lightsaber.

A lightsaber was a sword made of light. A sword was a weapon used to murder people.

A Jedi was a knight who believed in an idea of relative good and performed supernatural feats using the Force. A Jedi used supernatural feats and his lightsaber to murder people with opposing ideas of relative good.

The Force was an ill-explained mystical energy which ran throughout the fictional universe of Star Wars. It was a device which allowed characters to perform supernatural feats whenever a lull was created by poor writing in the screenplay.

As might be imagined, the Force was used with great frequency. — Jarett Kobek

Like most modern people, we no longer bothered to make the distinction between events in real life and the dramas of fictional worlds, and so the cliff-hanger that inevitably, reliably ended the hour held just as much or more importance to us as the newspaper that usually went from doorstep to garbage bin unread, and we speculated about the future lives of the characters that populated decayed mansions or desert isles as if they weren't inventions of other human minds. — Dexter Palmer

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

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

I love to have real people of history interact with my fictional characters. History gives me the plot. I research the period meticulously, and then I blend in a romantic and sensual love story to give it balance. The heavier the history, the more romantic the couple must be. — Virginia Henley

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

Just because we're fictional characters doesn't mean you can pick us up and move us anywhere you want.
the people of Lake Woebegon — Garrison Keillor

Today's youth cannot miss something they have never known, but I fear that there are no current fictional characters whose impact and influence will last with such abiding affection into their 'sore and yellow' as this splendid man's creations have in mine! — Peter Cushing

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

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

If you ever meet someone who thinks they are so special, the best thing to do is smile. You don't have to say anything. Be friendly and then go do
your best. That will make you special, too! — Jeff Hutchins

Why bother with fictional characters and plots when the world was full of more marvelous stories that were true, with characters so fresh, so powerful, so new, that they stepped from into the narratives under their own power? — Doris Kearns Goodwin

They were ... no ordinary group, gathering together to kill an evening, to seek refuge from critical husbands and demanding children while idly discussing their new best-seller. They met because literature was their shared passion. Books were as important to them as breath itself. They shared the ability to immerse themselves in the lives of fictional characters, to argue passionately about the development of plots, about decisions taken, dilemmas resolved. — Gloria Goldreich

And I am not one of these long-living fictional characters who prays for death as a release from the captivity of eternal life; not for me the endless whining and wailing of the undead. — John Boyne

Once I had opened a book and read its pages, those characters could never be taken away from me. Even if the books were burned, they would still live on in my mind. — Jennifer Wilson

Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off. — John Banville

Tonight, I want to curl up with a good book and visit my fictional boyfriends. Now let me tell you, my list is long. I am the equivalent to Hugh Hefner, but instead of bunnies I have this ever-growing list of male characters that have stolen my heart. I — Kat T. Masen

[W]hen I put Jorge in the library I did not yet know he was the murderer. He acted on his own, so to speak. And it must not be thought that this is an 'idealistic' position, as if I were saying that the characters have an autonomous life and the author, in a kind of trance, makes them behave as they themselves direct him. That kind of nonsense belongs in term papers. The fact is that the characters are obliged to act according to the laws of the world in which they live. In other words, the narrator is the prisoner of his own premises. — Umberto Eco

We referenced fictional characters as if they were people to learn from. As if real-life people were too nebulous, too private and unreal for us to understand. — Miguel Syjuco

Writing historical novels can be dangerous. We need to be as accurate and as fair about the historical record as we can be, at the same time as creating our fictional characters and, hopefully, telling a good story. The challenge is weaving the fiction into the history. — Edward Rutherfurd

Well, 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. — Keira Knightley

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

Maybe the midnight disease was like that, too. After a while you lost the ability to distinguish between your fictional and actual words; you confused yourself with your characters, and the random happenings of your life with the machinations of a plot. — Michael Chabon

I would rather portray the hero if it's a really great film. All my favorite fictional film characters are heroes, such as in 'The Last of the Mohicans' and 'Robin Hood.' — Jonathan Jackson

Real people are made out of a whole lot of things - flesh, bone, blood, nerves, stuff like that. Literary people are made out of words. — Thomas C. Foster

As for most writers, language is vital for me: a writer's ability to render a fictional world - characters, landscape, emotions - into something original that alters or deepens my understanding of both literature and life. — Dinaw Mengestu

By the way, the best place to find names for fictional characters, if you are ever foolish enough to write a novel, is in a Bradshaw or an ABC. All the nicest people always sound like railway stations. — Beverley Nichols

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

I suppose all fictional characters, especially in adventure or heroic fiction, at the end of the day are our dreams about ourselves. And sometimes they can be really revealing. — Alan Moore

And yet, for a writer of fiction, part of the heart remains that of a stranger, for what we are trying to do is to understand those others who are our fictional characters, somehow to gain entrance to their minds and feelings, to respect them for themselves as human individuals, and to portray them as truly as we can. The whole process of fiction is a mysterious one, and a writer, however experienced, remains in some ways a perpetual amateur, or perhaps a perpetual traveller, an explorer of those inner territories, those strange lands of the heart and spirit. — Margaret Laurence

There are only two things you'll ever need to know about me, Farin - and you should know them well. I'm very smart, and I'm very rich. — Heather O'Brien

I love working fictional characters into a piece of history. It plays to my strengths, which are characterization and dialogue, and assists me in my admitted weakness, plot. — Laurie Graham

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

I went to Colby College in Waterville, ME and did picture it when I was writing 'Cum Laude.' So many of the physical details were included, like the loop where people jogged. The story of the chapel is also borrowed from Colby ... but the students and cast of characters are fictional. — Cecily Von Ziegesar