Unlikeable Quotes & Sayings

I don't write books for people to be friends with the characters. If you want to find friends, go to a cocktail party. — Zoe Heller

We grew up watching Woody Allen and Albert Brooks movies, and we see this neurotic, annoying, unlikeable male at the center of a story, and people root for him anyway. I think that's really what we have been craving as women is the hero who doesn't look perfect and doesn't act perfectly. — Jill Soloway

It's relatively easy to create an ambiguous character. Any conglomeration of likable and unlikeable traits, chosen at random, will result in an ambiguous character. Getting an audience to deeply identify with a character, on the other hand, is one of the hardest things in the world to do. — Matt Bird

The hope in literature is that we are allowed to be imperfect, to write of our imperfection, without being overly critiqued for being unlikeable. — Kate Zambreno

I think one's person's unlikeable is another's lovable. — Tom Barbash

I always find it easier to portray myself as being unlikeable and idiotic; to actually play a character that is likeable and engages the audience is far more difficult. It's a more subtle kind of challenge. — Steve Coogan

I think the female first-person is still dismissed, demonized, especially if the book does not end on an empowering note, especially if the main character is perceived as unlikeable, or too privileged. — Kate Zambreno

It's a trap I've fallen into earlier in my career - trying to be liked. Don't do it. When I watch TV and I see someone trying to make me like them, acting cute or quirky or goofy, I'm not impressed. Don't act like America's watching you. Just latch onto your character. Characters are flawed. Be unlikeable. Be flawed. Be a person. — Nathan Fillion

We would talk about chemistry for hours at end, for I liked complex benzene rings with methyl groups hanging here and there, and she liked the thirty-something teacher who taught us the subject. Little did I know that we wouldn't last long. For, I was like an inert gas, unlikeable and uninteractive, while she was like an alkali, combustible and excitable. — Durjoy Datta

Wanting to be liked is often a very unlikeable characteristic. — Stephen Fry

Because the vast majority of leaders are men, it is not possible to generalize from any one example. But the dearth of female leaders causes one woman to be viewed as representative of her entire gender. And because people often discount and dislike female leaders, these generalizations are often critical. This is not just unfair to the individuals but reinforces the stigma that successful women are unlikeable. — Sheryl Sandberg

All are shaped by things beyond their control, traits inherited, traits learned. For Linus, the piece of his leg bone that had refused to lengthen defined him. As he grew, lameness begot shyness, shyness begot stammer, and thus Linus grew into an unlikeable little boy who discovered that attention came his way only when he behaved badly. — Kate Morton

I think what's most fun is playing someone who's sort of selfish and in a lot of ways unlikeable, but there's this really big heart underneath it that you get little glimpses of. — David Walton

One of the most intensely unlikeable figures of the twentieth century, fanatical anti-Semite, enemy of labour unions and proud recipient of medals from Nazi Germany, where Hitler held him in veneration, Henry Ford was also an employer who paid his workers more than his competitors, an innovator who pioneered the assembly line and a visionary whose part in the creation of the twentieth century was so great that Aldous Huxley, in his Brave New World, prefigured a society whose calendar was divided into BF and AF-Before Ford and After Ford. — Stephen Fry

I don't agree with the idea that my characters are unlikeable. — Noah Baumbach

It's a challenge of to write a narrator who is doing something that is really unlikeable and morally questionable. A lot of times, you read a book because you like the character, you are cheering for the character; you want the best for the character. — Alissa Nutting

Make no mistake, every child has his own light, no matter how difficult or defiant or unlikeable he or she might seem. — Nancy Rose

The Baron took his cane and put it under the doctor's chin. "You are a very unlikeable man. In my true form, I'd think you as little more than spooge on the bottom of my shoe. — Daniel Younger