Protagonists Quotes - Page 7

• I started writing novels while an undergraduate student, in an attempt to make sense of the city of Edinburgh, using a detective as my protagonist. Each book hopefully adds another piece to the jigsaw that is modern Scotland, asking questions about the nation's politics, economy, psyche and history ... and perhaps pointing towards its possible future.

  Ian Rankin

  Book, Writing, Asking Questions

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• This bill would renounce the safe, proper, and acceptable role for Government as a referee of disputes between the governed. It would interpose the Government as a biased protagonist, armed with the awesome authority of the Federal Government, in addition to rulemaking and umpire powers. The broad grants of power to the Attorney General to initiate and intervene in civil actions would go far toward transforming him into George Orwell's 'Big Brother' of '1984,' in the year 1964.

  Strom Thurmond

  Brother, Years, Umpires

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• My parents are amazing. When I said I wanted to go into film, they didn't understand it, but they were incredibly supportive. But growing up, I absolutely did have that feeling of, "Wow, somebody just gave me up." That was infused in The Secret Life of Bees too - the protagonist wanting unconditional love from her dead but much-imagined mother.

  Gina Prince-Bythewood

  Mother, Growing Up, Unconditional Love

  Source: www.mtv.com

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• 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

  Historical, Nonfiction, Female

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• One of the bibles of my youth was 'Birds of the West Indies,' by James Bond, a well-known ornithologist, and when I was casting about for a name for my protagonist I thought, 'My God, that's the dullest name I've ever heard,' so I appropriated it. Now the dullest name in the world has become an exciting one.

  Ian Fleming

  West Indies, Names, Bird

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• 'Argo,' 'Lincoln,' and 'Zero Dark Thirty,' three films honored with Best Picture Oscar nominations, lionize their Washington-anchored protagonists as crafty, competent, and virtually incorruptible.

  Ron Fournier

  Zero, Dark, Three

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• We tend to think of orphans as being the protagonist of stories we read when we're kids, and yet here you are: you're an adult, you're supposed to manage, you're supposed to get over it, you're supposed to go on with your life, and you feel like a lost child.

  Sandra Cisneros

  Children, Kids, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The main question in drama, the way I was taught, is always, 'What does the protagonist want?' That's what drama is. It comes down to that. It's not about theme, it's not about ideas, it's not about setting, but what the protagonist wants.

  David Mamet

  Drama, Ideas, Doe

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• I feel like I have had to catch up to the art I've made, and learn from the protagonists I have written, especially in relation to gender.

  Vivek Shraya

  Art, Gender, Made

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Femininity, yes, effectively there is more in The First Man, not only in terms of women but stylistically, in its elements, the notes he wrote. You can see a real love story in it, a childhood love story, [Albert] Camus' first. Meursault [protagonist of The Outsider] and Marie were never up to much really. There is Dora in The Just and others in his plays, but they aren't so well known.

  Catherine Camus

  Real, Men, Play

  Source: www.spikemagazine.com

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• I'd love to write something for a male protagonist. That's sort of the next frontier for me. I think it'd be really amazing to write the kind of parts that I love for women but for a guy.

  Lena Dunham

  Writing, Thinking, Guy

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• Mindi Scott has a real talent for getting inside her protagonist's head. She sketches out Coley's story in grand swathes, and then paints in all the little details, so that you feel as though you are enmeshed in Coley's brain: thinking her thoughts, feeling her confusion, anger, and, in the end, pain. I just don't think it's possible to read this book and not identify with Coley in some way.

  Amber Benson

  Pain, Real, Book

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• The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love, and then we torture them. The more we love them, and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story. Sometimes we try to protect them from getting booboos that are too big. Don’t. This is your protagonist, not your kid.

  Janet Fitch

  Kids, People, Trying

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• 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

  Two, Back And Forth, Seasons

  Source: collider.com

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• There is a social contract in "Fight Club" and in "Choke" where the protagonist has deceived a whole bunch of people. In "Choke" it's all of these people who think that they've saved his life, and really care about him because they've embraced him and they've been his saviors. In "Fight Club" it's all of these people who are dying of various diseases, and they thought that Edward Norton was also dying so they allowed him really strong pent-up emotions.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Strong, Fighting, Thinking

  "Chuck Palahnuik On 'Choke'". Interview with Cole Smithey, www.colesmithey.com. September 24, 2008.

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• 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

  Men, White Man, Two

  "'Serpent' Film Explores, Revives Lost Cultural Knowledge For Colombians". "Weekend Edition Sunday" with Tom Cole, www.npr.org. February 21, 2016.

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• I find myself writing protagonists who do feel pretty cut off from others but who want to make connections and aren't very good at it.

  Leni Zumas

  Writing, Cutting, Connections

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Creativity is basically a feminine process. I'm convinced that we have in our soul, everybody, this masculine side and this feminine side. So at the end of the day, you always use this feminine creative energy to write or to do any type of art or creativity. So if I see that my protagonist is feminine, it's not more difficult, no. And even when my protagonist is masculine, I'm writing from using this feminine energy.

  Paulo Coelho

  Art, Creativity, Writing

  "Book Talk: Paulo Coelho on life, work and 'Adultery'". Interview with Lisa Von Ahn, www.reuters.com. November 13, 2014.

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• Ostwald was a great protagonist and an inspiring teacher. He had the gift of saying the right thing in the right way. When we consider the development of chemistry as a whole, Ostwald's name like Abou ben Adhem's leads all the rest ... Ostwald was absolutely the right man in the right place. He was loved and followed by more people than any chemist of our time.

  Wilder Dwight Bancroft

  Teacher, Inspiration, Science

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• The Internet is the hope of an integrated world without frontiers, a common world without controlling owners, a world of opportunities and equality. This is a utopia that we have been dreaming about and is a world in which each and every one of us are protagonists of a destiny that we have in our hands.

  Laura Chinchilla

  Dream, Opportunity, Destiny

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• Tokyo Heist is a fast-paced, exotic reading adventure, a story where The da Vinci Code meets the wildly popular manga genre! Author Diana Renn infuses protagonist Violet with plenty of chikara (power) and Renn's fresh, spot-on author's voice is irresistible. I couldn't put it down!

  Alane Ferguson

  Reading, Adventure, Voice

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• Show me a novelist – or, indeed, a reader – who wasn’t a socially awkward, self-conscious adolescent, prone to clumsiness and excessive reading and I’ll… well, I’ll probably bang my shoulder on the door frame as I storm out. Many of the most unforgettable female fictional protagonists are gauche, self-doubting, plain and think too much.

  Charlotte Mendelson

  Reading, Thinking, Doors

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• I don't judge in my books. I don't have to have the antagonist get shot or the protagonist win. It's just how it comes out. I'm just telling a story.

  Elmore Leonard

  Book, Writing, Winning

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• 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

  Struggle, Past, Vision

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• This act of empathy, that women go through from the time we're little girls - we read all of literature, all of history, it's really about boys, most of it. But I can feel more like Peter Pan than Tinker Bell, or like Wendy. I wanted to be Tom Sawyer, not Becky. And we're so used to that act of empathizing with the protagonist of a male-driven plot. I mean, that's what we've done all our lives. You read history, you read great literature, Shakespeare, it's all fellas, you know?

  Meryl Streep

  Girl, Mean, Boys

  Source: blankonblank.org

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