Quotes About Protagonists

“My protagonists are my mother's voice and the mind I had when I was thirteen.”

— Harold Brodkey

“We may think of ourselves as static anti-heroes, but in reality we're dynamic protagonists just waiting for our courage to kick in.”

— Justin Alcala

“I'm drawn to characters who bear similarities to the protagonists in myths and legends. ( ... )”

— Alan Lee

“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

“A man's death makes everything certain about him. Of course, secrets may die with him. And of course, a hundred years later somebody looking through some papers may discover a fact which throws a totally different light on his life and of which all the people who attended his funeral were ignorant. Death changes the facts qualitatively but not quantitatively. One does not know more facts about a man because he is dead. But what one already knows hardens and becomes definite. We cannot hope for ambiguities to be clarified, we cannot hope for further change, we cannot hope for more. We are now the protagonists and we have to make up our minds.”

— John Berger

“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

“Good story thrives on protagonists in pain.”

— Chuck Wendig

“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

“You don't need to like your protagonists.”

— Anson Mount

“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'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

“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

“One can believe James's claim to an "imagination of disaster"; so many of his protagonists are unhappy in the end, and yet he gives them an aura of victory. It is because these characters depend on such high degree on their own sense of integrity that for them, victory has nothing to do with happiness. It has more to do with a settling within oneself, a movement inward that makes them whole.”

— Azar Nafisi

“I think as women we've always been very used to growing up reading and identifying with male protagonists, especially in fantasy. There's a saying in publishing that girls will read about boys, but boys will only read about boys, and it's important to give women strong heroines.”

— Cassandra Clare

“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

“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

“But protagonists are protagonists and heroes are heroes.”

— David Baldacci

“Most traditional ghost stories feature rather hapless protagonists, who have nasty things happen to them.”

— Jonathan Stroud

“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

“That's what protagonists do. They work hard, they have a conflict, they overcome the obstacles.”

— Jon Heder

“Characters stretching their legs in some calm haven generally don't make for interesting protagonists.”

— Darin Strauss

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“I've always read broadly: literary fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, chick lit, historical, dystopian, nonfiction, memoir. I've even read Westerns. I prefer female protagonists.”

— Sandra Cisneros

“'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

“Tunisia's responsibility, and especially that of its political and intellectual elites, is enormous. All the protagonists of the nation's social, cultural, economic and political life must work to overcome useless and counterproductive polarisation, and to find solutions to domestic, regional and international problems.”

— Tariq Ramadan

“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

“You almost feel dirty for reading [Gillian Flynn's] books, like you've been forced to join your conscience with those of her morally murky protagonists.”

— Tarryn Fisher

“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

“I like when people question if the characters are really villains or protagonists. These types are very interesting to write about.”

— Jack Higgins

“I believe young children in particular enjoy witnessing the survival of youthful protagonists against terrible odds. I think it's gratifying to the reader when you give young characters that kind of agency.”

— Robert Paul Weston

“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

“In fact, Guerra based his story on the diaries of two explorers, German Theodor Koch-Grunberg and American Richard Evans Schultes. There work is some of the only documentation of cultures that have since vanished. But Guerra did not want white men to be his protagonists.”

— Tom Cole

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

— Pete Gill

“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

“It seems to me that most good protagonists are both clever and resourceful. They are intelligent and can fix things, both little and big. They can come up with inventive solutions others would never think of.”

— Keren Woodward

“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

“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

“Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition.”

— Pauline Kael

“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

“My protagonists, male and female, are me.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

“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