Quotes & Sayings About Protagonists

The Internet is the hope of an integrated world without frontiers, a common world without controlling owners, a world of opportunities and equality. This is a utopia that we have been dreaming about and is a world in which each and every one of us are protagonists of a destiny that we have in our hands. — Laura Chinchilla

Most traditional ghost stories feature rather hapless protagonists, who have nasty things happen to them. — Jonathan Stroud

I've been playing with this idea in my mind that the hero's journey that we're all taught as screenwriters may resonate more specifically for male protagonists and maybe even male viewers. — Jill Soloway

For anyone who wants to understand the art of storytelling, this film [The Hunt for Red October] should suffice; one wonders why universities persist in teaching narrative principles on the basis of Propp, Greimas or other such punishing curricula, instead of investing in a projection room. Premise, plot, protagonists, adventures, quest, heroes and other stimulants: all you need is Sean Connery in the uniform of a Russian submarine officer and a few well-placed aircraft carriers. — Muriel Barbery

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

I find myself writing protagonists who do feel pretty cut off from others but who want to make connections and aren't very good at it. — Leni Zumas

We knew the Syrian situation was complex and there were lots of divisions, particularly on the side of the opposition.This is a tough job.It can perhaps be done if you stand united and work with me in putting sustained pressure on the protagonists or the parties to come together and seek a political settlement. — Kofi Annan

I'm not interested in making movies only with female protagonists. I think it's ridiculous to think that a female director can't direct men. That makes no sense to me. — Elizabeth Banks

I read the story of Red Riding Hood today. I think the wolf was the most interesting character in it. Red Riding Hood was a stupid little thing so easily fooled. — L.M. Montgomery

What I wanted was for them to have a grand, sweeping narrative that they deserved, the kind of American history that belongs to the Wright Brothers and the astronauts, to Alexander Hamilton and Martin Luther King Jr. Not told as a separate history, but as part of the story we all know. Not at the margins, but at the very center, the protagonists of the drama. And not just because they are black, or because they are women, but because they are part of the American epic. — Margot Lee Shetterly

We are the protagonists of our love story, not the spectators. — Matt Walsh

I'm more comfortable writing traditional protagonists. But 'Steve Jobs' and 'The Social Network' have antiheroes. I like to write antiheroes as if they're making their case to God about why they should be allowed into heaven. I have to find something in that character that is like me and write to that. — Aaron Sorkin

In the history of enterprise, most of the protagonists of major new products and companies began their education - not in the classroom, where the old ways are taught, but in the factories and labs where new ways are wrought ... nothing has been so rare in recent years as an Ivy League graduate who has made a significant innovation in American enterprise. — George Gilder

You have to go out of your way as a suspense novelist to find situations where the protagonists are somewhat helpless and in real danger. — Nelson DeMille

Dreams have consequences. There is no turning back. A revolution is not a painless march to the gates of freedom and justice. It is a struggle between rage and hope, between the temptation to destroy and the desire to build. Its temperament is desperate. It is a tormented response to the past, to all that has happened, the recalled and unrecalled injustices - for the memory of a revolution reaches much further back than the memory of its protagonists. — Hisham Matar

Nobody is ever just a straight up protagonist or antagonist - everybody's morally ambiguous. — Cheyenne Jackson

We may be the protagonists of tragedy, but we are also the heroes of our most beautiful and thrilling experiences. — Shin Kyung-sook

As women, we are the protagonists of our own personal novels. We are called upon to be the heroines of our own lives, not supporting characters. — Erin Blakemore

Fiction is an antidote, a reminder of the power of individual choice. Every novel has at its core a choice by at least one of its protagonists, reminding the reader that she can choose to be her own person, to go against what her parents or society or the state tell her to do and follow the faint but essential beat of her own heart. — Azar Nafisi

I would agree with your statement that many of my protagonists are outsiders. I wonder if we all are, and even people who don't think they are, and they're just better at masking it. When we shut our bedroom door at night, however well-integrated we think we are with the rest of society, maybe there's something illusory about that ... — David Mitchell

Films with female protagonists don't attract many eyeballs. Most of them are perceived as feminist films. If Bollywood starts giving women major roles in entertaining movies, then the audience, too, will open up to the idea of watching commercial films in which the actresses do more than just play the role of the hero's love interest. — Bipasha Basu

Once you have a situation that is fresh, then you sort of believe in it and it becomes normal. So you do end up with protagonists that haven't been in other movies before. — Paul Schrader

It is a commonplace that the League of Nations is not yet-what its most enthusiastic protagonists intended it to be. — Hjalmar Branting

I've come to realize one thing, that stories are always bigger than we are, they happen to us and we are their protagonists without realizing it, but in the stories we live, we aren't the true protagonists, the true protagonist is the story itself. — Antonio Tabucchi

It is made up of one character each from the names of three of the major female protagonists of the novel (P'an Chin-lien, Li P'ing-erh, and P'ang Ch'un-mei) that would literally mean Gold Vase Plum; it can be semantically construed as The Plum in the Golden Vase, or Plum Blossoms in a Golden Vase; and it puns with three near homophones that might be rendered as The Glamour of Entering the Vagina. — David Tod Roy

That's what protagonists do. They work hard, they have a conflict, they overcome the obstacles. — Jon Heder

I'm drawn to characters who bear similarities to the protagonists in myths and legends. ( ... ) — Alan Lee

I really get fired up with female protagonists. I can really feel the difference in myself when I am writing a script that has a woman at the center. — Linda Woolverton

Most of 'Let the Great World Spin' is centered on the day in 1974 when Philippe Petit walked on a tightrope between the two towers of the World Trade Center, creating an astonishing spectacle that intersects with the lives of many of the novel's multiple protagonists. — Susan Barker

We are all protagonists, each and every one of us. — Dalton Frey

Women are never the protagonists; we're always reactionary against everything that's done to us. I like people who write for women that have got a bit more about them. — Neve McIntosh

It is the objective of the protagonist that keeps us in our seats. — David Mamet

Characters stretching their legs in some calm haven generally don't make for interesting protagonists. — Darin Strauss

The great protagonists are those who fight for their ideas and ideals despite the fact that they receive no recognition at the hands of their contemporaries. They are the men whose memories will be enshrined in the hearts of the future generations. It seems then as if each individual felt it his duty to make retroactive atonement for the wrong which great men have suffered at the hands of their contemporaries. Their lives and their work are then studied with touching and grateful admiration. Especially in dark days of distress, such men have the power of healing broken hearts and elevating the despairing spirit of a people. — Adolf Hitler

'What It Is' was based on this class I've been teaching for 10 years - I wanted to write a book about writing that didn't mention stuff like story structure, protagonists, and all those things that we know about only because they already exist in stories. — Lynda Barry

The Hawk and the Dove is a wonderful idea for a book, wonderfully carried out. Nicholas Thompson has used illuminating new material to present each of his protagonists in a convincing, respectful, but unsparing way. Even more valuable, he has used the interactions and tensions between Paul Nitze and George Kennan to bring much of American 20th century foreign policy to life, with human richness ever present but with the big issues clear in all their complexity. — James Fallows

In place of negative falsification, we have nurtured, in the past thirty years, a new fetishization. Black female protagonists are now unerringly strong and soulful; they are sexually voracious and unafraid; they take the unreal forms of earth mothers, African queens, divas, spirits of history; they process grandly through novels thick with a breed of greeting-card lyricism. They have little of the complexity, the flaws and uncertainties, depth and beauty of Janie Crawford and the novel she springs from. — Zadie Smith

The Greeks were the first intellectualists. In a world where the irrational had played the chief role, they came forward as the protagonists of the mind. — Edith Hamilton

My father used to say that all protagonists were versions of the author who wrote them - even if it meant the author had to acknowledge a side of himself that he did not know existed. It just required courage. — Catherine Lowell

I had the feeling that focusing on objects and telling a story through them would make my protagonists different from those in Western novels - more real, more quintessentially of Istanbul. — Orhan Pamuk

Over time, it's occurred to me that my protagonists all originate in some aspect of myself that I find myself questioning or feeling uncomfortable about. — Julia Glass

How do you get the protagonists and antagonists together, in the same space, without somebody having to die? So, we ended up having to tell two distinct stories, which is never the ultimate way to create a great serialized drama. So then, of course, we had the tragedy with Andy [Whitfield], which made everything very difficult and pushed back. — Chris Albrecht

I felt that Lionsgate really understood the material and that they would let us make a faithful adaptation; that they wouldn't soften it, they wouldn't age up the characters, to make them older so that it would be more palatable. I felt that the power of the book was in the youth of these protagonists and that you couldn't cheat on that in terms of their age in the story. Lionsgate was on board for, of course, the PG-13 version of the movie, not something full of blood and guts, but something more thematically driven. -Nina Jacobson, pg. 14 — Kate Egan

Look at the Coen brothers. All their minor characters are as interesting as their protagonists. If the smaller characters are well-written, the whole world of the film becomes enriched. It's not the size of the thing, but the detail. — Brendan Gleeson

Speaking generally, I think it's useful to acknowledge explicitly the power imbalance between a journalist and the protagonists in a story about poor people, even to make that imbalance part of the story - and to redress it, narratively, where you can. — William Finnegan

My protagonists, male and female, are me. — Madeleine L'Engle

My protagonists are my mother's voice and the mind I had when I was thirteen. — Harold Brodkey

The most important thing in the job is to make movies about women where they are characters that have consequences in the story. They can be villains, they can be protagonists, I don't care but their movements, their actions what they do in the plot has to actually matter. — Amy Pascal

I'm a girl, so I've experienced dismissal because I was a girl or because I write about girls: my book with a guy protagonist is treated as more literary and worthy than my other books with girl protagonists. — Sarah Rees Brennan

Join hands with other protagonists of love and peace and become a love commander. — Pooja Ruprell

Horror fiction allows us to confront and sublimate our fears of an uncontrollable universe, but the threat verges on the overwhelming and may indeed carry the protagonists away. Spy fiction in contrast allows us to believe for a while that the little people can, by obtaining secret knowledge, acquire some leverage over the overwhelming threats that permeate their universe. — Charles Stross

Is it unprecedented for two goalkeepers employed in a match comprising seven goals to be the fixture's most competent protagonists? — Pete Gill

Doctor Mengele is such a powerful character historically, as powerful as Nazism itself, so these subjects always tend to be the protagonists. What I think is that despite this historical references, Wakolda or The German Doctor is a very intimate story. — Lucia Puenzo

As long as the protagonist wants something, the audience will want something. — David Mamet

I'm interested in flawed protagonists. I was raised on them. — Laura Dern

Most literary critics agree that fiction cannot be reduced to mere falsehood. Well-crafted protagonists come to life, pornography causes orgasms, and the pretense that life is what we want it to be may conceivably bring about the desired condition. Hence religious parables, socialist realism, Nazi propaganda. And if this story likewise crawls with reactionary supernaturalism, that might be because its author longs to see letters scuttling across ceilings, cautiously beginning to reify themselves into angels. For if they could only do that, then why not us? — William T. Vollmann

Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists. — Norman Mailer

With the crime novels, it's delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. It's like having a fictitious family. — John Banville

Make the audience wonder what's going on by putting them in the same position as the protagonist. — David Mamet

In most shows, there's usually a hero or a protagonist, and even if there are multiple heroes or protagonists, most shows try and make it so you really always know who's the good guy and who's the bad guy. — Jill Soloway

Employing women as my primary protagonists has allowed me to step outside of myself, to distance myself from my own personality, far more easily than were I to look at events from a masculine perspective. — Tom Robbins

I always think that it's wrong to put images of my protagonists on the cover of my novels because readers can identify with characters only if they are given the chance to imagine them independently. — Orhan Pamuk

It was great to essentially have two protagonists where you're sympathies could go back and forth between the two of them, throughout the season. — Tony Goldwyn

Georgia Author Brenda Sutton Rose captures some of the conflicted and captivating characters of a rapidly changing South. — Janisse Ray

What then, is dark fantasy? I would argue that it is a genre of fantasy whose protagonists inhabit the world of consensual mundane reality and learn otherwise, not by walking through a portal into some other world, or by being devoured or destroyed irrevocably, but by learning to live with new knowledge and sometimes with new flesh. — Roz Kaveney

In general, I've found female protagonists more intriguing to work with than males. I cherish women and have always preferred their company, reveling in their perfumes, their contours, their finer-grained sensibilities, lunar intuitions, nurturing instincts and relatively unfettered emotions
although I'm certainly not unaware that there are plenty of neurotic, uptight, stupid women in the world. — Tom Robbins

They had the magic pill, the solution to the inertia and frustration that has plagued the great literary protagonists I'd related to all my life - be it Leopold Bloom, Alex Portnoy, or Piglet from Winnie the Pooh. As — Neil Strauss

I have confronted theoretical positions whose protagonists claim that what I take to be historically produced characteristics of what is specifically modern are in fact the timelessly necessary characteristics of all and any moral judgment, of all and any selfhood. — Alasdair MacIntyre

While books provided me with some escape from the mental and physical horrors of my early life, they were unreliable. Many times the protagonists suffered terribly and then died at the end. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

I do think that I have a more flexible view of the interactions between people, and between human and non-human protagonists, humans and their landscapes. — Karen Russell

In the past, I'll admit, I've enjoyed being compared to the protagonists in my screenplays. — Diablo Cody

An ambitious, surreal tale of the love between a young Arab girl sold into marriage and the orphan boy she adopts, 'Habibi' spans multiple eras of conflict and change, stretching the lifetimes of its two protagonists over many centuries. — G. Willow Wilson

Everyone likes a bit of variety. I'm sure none of my readers only want to read about anti-heroes or villainous protagonists any more than they only want to read about square-jawed heroes doing the right thing. I just write characters than entertain me and hope they'll be ones that other people want to read about, too. — Mark Lawrence

The immersive stories of This Is Paradise are a lithe blend of formal invention and traditional narrative pleasures. As such they reflect Kristiana Kahakauwila's intimate but expansive vision of a Hawai'i forged from the collisions of past and present, here and there. Her protagonists are as richly distinctive as the pidgin they speak, and yet each struggles profoundly with identity-that negotiation between ourselves and the world, which is at once Hawaiian, American, universally and compellingly human. — Peter Ho Davies

As Jane Austen might have put it: It is a truth universally acknowledged that young protagonists in search of adventure must ditch their parents. — Philip Pullman

To me there's no difference between writing YA and adult except that in YA I make the book a little shorter and the protagonists are teens. The difference is in the readers. — Charles De Lint

There were adventure stories supplied with cloths for mopping your brow, thrillers containing pressed leaves of soothing valerian to be sniffed when the suspense became too great, and books with stout locks sealed by the Atlantean censorship authorities ("Sale permitted, reading prohibited!"). One shop sold nothing but 'half' works that broke off in the middle because their author had died while writing them; another specialised in novels whose protagonists were insects. I also saw a Wolperting shop that sold nothing but books on chess and another patronised exclusively by dwarfs with blond beards, all of whom wore eye-shades. — Walter Moers

At the heart of any successful film is a powerful story. And a story should be just that: a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end, powerful protagonists that audiences can identify with, and a dramatic arc that is able to capture and hold viewers' intellectual and emotional attention. — Julia Bacha

But protagonists are protagonists and heroes are heroes. — David Baldacci

I loved films of the '70s with those antihero protagonists who you don't know if you can get behind because their behavior is really questionable. — Nicholas Jarecki

Real literature was about psychological, emotional, and social truth as demonstrated by the actions and reflections of its protagonists; the novel was about character developed over time. — Julian Barnes

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

The nature of the universe probably depends heavily on who is the actual protagonist. Lately I've been suspecting it's one of my cats. — Wil McCarthy

Fiction is about human beings, first and foremost. (It's not impossible to write fiction with no human protagonists, but it's very hard to keep the reader interested ... ) — Charles Stross

Since so many romantic comedies vary little in their storyline, the success or failure of such movies depends largely on whether we believe in the relationship of the protagonists. — Mariella Frostrup

For the blockbusters, people were always telling me that if you write female protagonists, the boys won't go, so you have to put the boys' stuff in it to get everybody. I write for people from 8 to 80, and that's not easy. — Linda Woolverton

The glory of the protagonist is always paid for
by a lot of secondary characters — Tony Hoagland

Both of the twins exhibited a sort of prized Wisconsin Aryan-ness that excused them from blame for almost any caper. they looked liked the protagonists from a Disney movie but behaved like After School Specials. — Josh Kilmer-Purcell

And here lies the crux of the matter: to say that nature is personal may mean not so much seeing the world differently as acting differently
or, to state it another way, it may mean interacting with more-than-human others in nature as if those others had a life of their own and then coming to see, through experience, that these others are living, interactive beings.
When nature is personal, the world is peopled by rocks, trees, rivers, and mountains, all of whom are actors and agents, protagonists of their own stories rather than just props in a human story. When Earth is truly alive, the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human. — Priscilla Stuckey

Just as women supplement men in private life, so they will supplement men in public life by concentrating their organized efforts on those objects which men are likely to ignore. There is a tremendous field for women as active protagonists of new ideas and new methods of political and social housekeeping. When organized and conscious of their power to influence their surroundings, women can use their newly acquired freedom in a great many ways to mold the world into a better place to live in. — Edward Bernays

Like the size and composition of a work, the walk and talk of an artist has to persuade, not just others but the performers themselves. Whether they have colorful, large-scale personas or minimal, low-key selves, believable artists are always protagonists, never secondary characters who inhabit stereotypes. For this reason, I see artists' studios as private stages for the daily rehearsal of self-belief. — Sarah Thornton

Of course I consider myself a Jewish writer - I am one! All of the protagonists in my five books have been Jewish, and I wouldn't be surprised if all my future main characters were as well. — Lauren Weisberger

Some undefined sorrow was hidden in the hearts of the protagonists as they stood in silence beneath the leafless trees and when the moment of farewell had come the kiss, which had been withheld by one, was given by both. — James Joyce

Good story thrives on protagonists in pain. — Chuck Wendig

For those protagonists we tend to admire the most, the Inciting Incident arouses not only a conscious desire, but an unconscious one as well. These complex characters suffer intense inner battles because these two desire are in direct conflict with each other. No matter what the character consciously thinks he wants, the audience senses or realizes that deep inside he unconsciously wants the very opposite. — Robert McKee

Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition. — Pauline Kael

If you run on lies long enough, they become your truth.
Such delicate fabric we conceal our motives in.
Colors to obscure the truth of our hearts.
No one is a bad person in his or her own mind.
We are all noble protagonists. — Rick Remender

The idea in The Man that Would Be King was that the music should recreate all that majestic surrounding and emphasize the adventure, but also speak about the frustration or, rather said, the curse of both protagonists, even before happened what happens them. — Maurice Jarre

I think women have every right to feel like they're the protagonists in their own stories. — Kelly Sue DeConnick

The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them. Most important, the grand narratives of emancipation and enlightenment mobilized people in the colonial world to rise up and throw off imperial subjection; in the process, many Europeans and Americans were also stirred by these stories and their protagonists, and they too fought for new narratives of equality and human community. — Edward W. Said