Quote

Science fiction writers put characters into a world with arbitrary rules and work out what happens.

To connect with the characters, you need to connect with the world. If the world feels vaguely familiar, I believe the characters will feel relatable.

In independent film you tend to have stories that involve more of a community, and the smaller characters are important to the story.

It's the same as any role and I find that you can't lump characters together; because they all have different life experiences, different reasons for being the way they are.

I believe strongly that characters are five-dimensional, and they're complicated, and life is complicated, and people are complicated.

I think that writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit. They have a kind of detachment, or try to have.

You put books out into the world, and people form their own visuals and images and attachments to characters; those characters become part of them, and they have their feelings about them.

I read somewhere once that in the 1960s, fiction writers were troubled by the notion that life was becoming stranger and more sensational than made-up stories could ever hope to be. Our new problem - more profound, I think - is that life no longer resembles a story. Events intersect but don't progress. People interact but don't make contact.

The properties of people and the properties of character have almost nothing to do with each other. They really don't. I know it seems like they do because we look alike, but people don't speak in dialogue. Their lives don't unfold in a series of scenes that form a narrative arc.