The goals of literature are multifold, but creating nice, positive protagonists that you'd want to grab drinks with or invite home to mom can hardly be considered one of them.

Since so many romantic comedies vary little in their storyline, the success or failure of such movies depends largely on whether we believe in the relationship of the protagonists.

I've been playing with this idea in my mind that the hero's journey that we're all taught as screenwriters may resonate more specifically for male protagonists and maybe even male viewers.

Of course I consider myself a Jewish writer - I am one! All of the protagonists in my five books have been Jewish, and I wouldn't be surprised if all my future main characters were as well.

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.

I had the feeling that focusing on objects and telling a story through them would make my protagonists different from those in Western novels - more real, more quintessentially of Istanbul.

I don't understand why people still behave as though making movies with female protagonists is risky, given that - hello - we do make up over 50 percent of the population, and we go to movies.

It's odd for me to compare my stuff to Lee Child's, because I'm such of fan of his, and also because it's curiously something I never did until I kept hearing about our protagonists' similarities.

'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.

There aren't many children's books about black characters that are just going on adventures. My library has over 2,000 children's books in it, and most of the protagonists are either white or creatures.

The protagonists that I've played tend to be people who make trouble. Or even if they don't make it, they certainly disrupt things. It's fun to do that in life as well. But I don't think I ever played myself.

Comedians have to entertain the audience within a stipulated time. It is not possible to explain what we intend to convey in a detailed manner. This can only be done in films where comedians are the protagonists.

Britain in 2018 has the feel of a Netflix drama approaching its season finale. It's the classic 'how on earth does anyone get out of this one?' kind of cliffhanger, with all of the key protagonists confronted by their nemesis.

Look at the Coen brothers. All their minor characters are as interesting as their protagonists. If the smaller characters are well-written, the whole world of the film becomes enriched. It's not the size of the thing, but the detail.

When writers for adults contemplate Venice, they behold decay, dereliction and death. Thomas Mann, Daphne du Maurier, L. P. Hartley and Salley Vickers have all dispatched hapless protagonists to Italy, where they see Venice - and die.

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.

'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.

The idea in The Man that Would Be King was that the music should recreate all that majestic surrounding and emphasize the adventure, but also speak about the frustration or, rather said, the curse of both protagonists, even before happened what happens them.

'Thelma and Louise' was a pretty important film for me and still is. It's a social film about many things - gender, freedom - and it puts someone like me into the place of these protagonists. Watching that movie, you are living through the eyes of these women.

Most of 'Let the Great World Spin' is centered on the day in 1974 when Philippe Petit walked on a tightrope between the two towers of the World Trade Center, creating an astonishing spectacle that intersects with the lives of many of the novel's multiple protagonists.

Television is often out ahead on social issues. With film, we've only recently proved that one of the oldest misconceptions in the book is wrong, which is the idea that girls will see films with boys as protagonists, but boys won't see movies with girls as protagonists.

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.

Part of my purpose in my books has been to tell the complete story of a relationship and a marriage, not just to end with 'happily ever after,' leaving the protagonists at the altar or in bed... I wanted to show some of the complicated business of actually living a successful marriage.

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.

The Cold War was over, presidential sex scandals superseded foreign concerns, and the American public was more interested in reading about fiendish serial killers, dependable mystery series protagonists, and any book thought to be in the vein of Bridget Jones and her abbreviation-happy diary.

At some point, I stumbled across my two main protagonists: William E. Dodd, a mild-mannered professor of history picked by Roosevelt to be America's first ambassador to Nazi Germany, and Dodd's comely and rather wild daughter, Martha, who at first was enthralled with the so-called Nazi revolution.

When my daughter was born, I was reading a lot of children's books, and there weren't any characters who looked like her. For all the content that's out there, there aren't many African-American protagonists. I looked at it like, if there isn't someone else creating it then I have to do it myself.

I'm more comfortable writing traditional protagonists. But 'Steve Jobs' and 'The Social Network' have antiheroes. I like to write antiheroes as if they're making their case to God about why they should be allowed into heaven. I have to find something in that character that is like me and write to that.

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.

Every manager is different in one way or another, but what stays the same is coaching Barcelona players - players who want the ball, who want to be protagonists on the field - so each manager who's been here has been able to take advantage of that, and, luckily, I feel we've become more complete because of it.

Everyone likes a bit of variety. I'm sure none of my readers only want to read about anti-heroes or villainous protagonists any more than they only want to read about square-jawed heroes doing the right thing. I just write characters than entertain me and hope they'll be ones that other people want to read about, too.

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.

In Hollywood, an Angelina Jolie is paid a fee that is probably at par with her male colleagues, but we can't expect the same here in India. Universally, films have meatier roles for men. Most films are about male protagonists and their histrionics on screen; women are signed up for song sequences and to up the glam quotient.

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.

A true nature is a gloomy monolith, sort of like that old black rotary phone that I had to sing 'Happy Birthday' to Grandpa on. But novelists, damn us, still need true natures - so we can give them to our protagonists. And so readers can vaguely predict how they'll behave when we trap them in 'situations' that they can't IM their way out of.

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