fictional characters QUOTES

1 " Just because we're fictional characters doesn't mean you can pick us up and move us anywhere you want.--the people of Lake Woebegon "

― Garrison Keillor

2 " If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats. "

― Richard Bach , Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah

3 " Our relationship with literary characters, at least to those that exercise a certain attraction over us, rests in fact on a denial. We know perfectly well, on a conscious level, that these characters “do not exist,” or in any case do not exist in the same way as do the inhabitants of the real world. But things manifest in an entirely different way on the unconscious level, which is interested not in the ontological differences between worlds but in the effect they produce on the psyche.
Every psychoanalyst knows how deeply a subject can be influenced, and even shaped, sometimes to the point of tragedy, by a fictional character and the sense of identification it gives rise to. This remark must first of all be understood as a reminder that we ourselves are usually fictional characters for other people […] "

― Pierre Bayard , Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong: Reopening the Case of The Hound of the Baskervilles

4 " Much of the joy in falling in love with fictional characters comes from being able to envision new stories from them. "

5 " Perhaps this is what Henry James meant when he talked about the “irresponsibility” of characters. Characters are irresponsible, art is irresponsible when compared to life, because it is first and foremost important that a character be real, and as readers or watchers we tend to applaud any effort made towards the construction of that reality. We do not, of course, indulge actual people in the world this way at all. In real life, the fact that something seems real to someone is not enough to interest us, or to convince us that that reality is interesting. But the self-reality of fictional characters is deeply engrossing, which is why villains are lovable in literature in ways that they are not in life. "

― James Wood , The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel

6 " Why bother with fictional characters and plots when the world was full of more marvelous stories that were true, with characters so fresh, so powerful, so new, that they stepped from into the narratives under their own power? "

― Doris Kearns Goodwin , The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism

7 " I believed in fictional characters as if they were a part of real life. Poetry was important, too. My parents had memorized poems from their days attending school in New York City and loved reciting them. We all enjoyed listening to these poems and to music as well. "