Characterisation Quotes

“He was endowed with the extraordinary powers of endurance characteristic of madmen and simpletons.”
― Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

“I would like to carve my novel in a piece of wood. My characters—I would like to have them heavier, more three-dimensional ... My characters have a profession, have characteristics; you know their age, their family situation, and everything. But I try to make each one of those characters heavy, like a statue, and to be the brother of everybody in the world.”
― Georges Simenon

“Very often the characters people respond best to have little parts of reality they can relate to.”
― Sara Sheridan

“It was not her way to make a conspicuous entry into anyone’s life, but towards the end of that week Sebastian said rather sourly: “You and mummy seem very thick,” and I realized that in fact I was being drawn into intimacy by swift, imperceptible stages, for she was impatient of any human relationship that fell short of it.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“First rule of exposition: Less is more.”
― Joyce Rachelle

“Wagner's gods and heroes are exactly like human beings, on a grand scale: every human virtue and every human temptation is there. Tolkien leaves a good half of them out. No one in Middle Earth has any sexual relations at all. I think their children must be delivered by post.”
― Philip Pullman, Dæmon Voices

“Milo still sported the same mustache I remembered from my childhood visits—a big swooping throwback to nineteenth-century lumbermen and prospectors. Now speckled gray and white, it curled down to enclose his small, thin-lipped mouth parenthetically. This had always made sense to me, since Milo spoke in asides.”
― Dominic Smith, Return to Valetto

“Susan is the opposite,” I said. “She’s big on feelings and insights, though she has an economist’s way with words. When she asks why I’m walking through an abyss of loneliness it sounds like she’s reading a nutrition label.”
― Dominic Smith, Return to Valetto

“If you put Mirabelle into some of the situations she gets into, there is only one way Mirabelle can behave.”
― Sara Sheridan

“Mirabelle and Vesta have plenty in common because they are facing descrimination in different ways, but they're also a nice contrast.”
― Sara Sheridan

“A word out of place or an interesting choice of vocabulary can spawn a whole character.”
― Sara Sheridan

“Sometimes I create a character from a scrap - a mere mention that has been left behind.”
― Sara Sheridan

“He turned his steel eyes at me. They hurt me, paralysed me, like the advancing lights of a car. I saw that his body was taut, all of it: also made of steel; that it only worked because it was at an intolerable tension, and that it was our sensation of that tension which had exhausted us, which could no longer be borne. He was the wrong spring which had been put into our machine, that had made Claude ill, George foolish, Boris an anxiety.”
― Mary Butts, The Complete Stories

“It’s just an old fella. Mostly bald. Walking dainty like his feet’s tender. And still singing. With some things in his hand. He puts them down on a drum. Sits on a milk crate in the shade. Pulls on a pair of gumboots. Then he snatches up the things from beside him and shuffles out in the sun and leans against the verandah post and I see him clear enough. Singlet. Baggy arse shorts. Thick specs. He’s short and thick this fella. Red in the face. And that stuff in his hand, it’s a knife and steel. He looks around, kind of slow and lazy. Stops singing then and just hums a minute while he hones the knife. And he knows how to freshen up a blade, that I can see straight up.”
― Tim Winton, The Shepherd's Hut

“Characterisation is, in truth, a crucial part of
creative writing, because it is the art of creation itself—the creative writer assumes the position of god, and gets his writing tools ready to beat and trim ideas into sensible animations.”
― Adewale Joel, Learn Creative Writing: A guide to writing perfect drafts