In the first book of my Discworld series, published more than 26 years ago, I introduced Death as a character; there was nothing particularly new about this - death has featured in art and literature since medieval times, and for centuries we have had a fascination with the Grim Reaper.
The English have always been greedy for news of times past, with that mixture of fatalism and melancholy which is part of the national character.
A man's character is his fate.
I am not sure how much good is done by moralising about fairy tales. This can be unsubtle - telling children that virtue will be rewarded, when in fact it is mostly simply the fact of being the central character that ensures a favourable outcome. Fairy tales are not, on the whole, parables.
It is an amazing feature in the French character that they will let themselves be led away so easily by bad counsels and yet return again so quickly. It is certain that as these people have, out of their misery, treated us so well, we are the more bound to work for their happiness.
Who a dancer is physically feeds into character for me. Always has.
I won't take parts where the female character has no substance.
Oftentimes in films, the female character, if she's not the protagonist - and often, even if she is - feels like an imitation of what a woman is.
In 'Boyz N the Hood,' every female character was three-dimensional.
I get really excited every time there's a female character who is really strong because a lot of females in film are really soft.
Even in stories that I like, with a female character that I love deeply, it always feels like there's something that she has to prove to the male characters before she can even get started.
People sort of accuse Tolkien of not being good with female characters, and I think that Eowyn actually proves that to be wrong to some degree. Eowyn is actually a strong female character, and she's a surprisingly modern character, considering who Tolkien actually was sort of a stuffy English professor in the 1930s and '40s.
I can't live in a world where there are only, like, four kinds of women. Or where every woman is obsessed with cake. The very least I ask is that we have one female character in the world who likes savory things! I don't have any role models who like cheese!
I think the book struck me in a few ways that I thought very interesting to pick it as my first martial arts film. It has a very strong female character and it was very abundant in classic Chinese textures.
Take 'Ex Machina.' Everyone said it was one of the great feminist works of science fiction. But what I found disappointing is that everything about the main female character is defined by men.
In my mind, every single female character I've written is plus-size.
A show that I loved as a kid was 'Maid Marian And Her Merry Men'. It was a really strong female character making fun of the boys, an inversion of gender politics. But it was very funny, too. I always wanted to be one of the village people messing about in the mud and being stinky.
I always say, if a guy writes the same lead female character type over and over, we are not seeing their writing chops so much as their dating website wishlist.
I started watching 'Daria' when I was in college because I didn't have cable growing up. It's such a smart show with a different type of female character.
I loved seeing a lead female character who isn't perfect and isn't demonized for it.
