Fresh Air

Kazuo Ishiguro on ‘Klara and the Sun’

It's not like she has her value system, which kind of clashes with what she finds. She's like a Tabula Rasa at the beginning, and she's quite childlike and very open. And so it's not just the way, the very restricted way in which she actually reads the world that appealed to me. I wanted some of that childlike freshness and openness and naivety to survive all the way through the text in her.

Fresh Air

Kazuo Ishiguro on ‘Klara and the Sun’

It's not like, you know, she has her value system, which kind of clashes with what she finds. She's like a tabula rasa at the beginning, and she's quite childlike and very open. I wanted her to remain like a very optimistic character who has a childlike faith in the presence of something good and protective in the world, even as she learns all these other things, darker things about the human world that she occupies.

Fresh Air

Mahershala Ali

I feel strongly that we are spirits having a physical experience. And I think it's just helpful for me to sort of locate how much I think a character is in conversation with his creator.

Fresh Air

Best Of: Kyle MacLachlan / Inside the ‘romance scam’

David's help and input was always to expand what I'd started and just more to think about more colors, more ideas, more suggestions about how to really deepen and enrich the character, the scene, the moment, whatever it might call for.

Book of the Day

Author Liane Moriarty on her long-awaited sequel to 'Big Little Lies' | NPR's Book of the Day

I just keep doing that with my books. my characters are getting older along with me. I guess I can remember reading books when I was younger about older women and thinking, isn't that interesting? They're still they still have a rich inner life. They're still people, still have relationships. And things still matter. They're not just sort of blobs.

Radiolab

Patient Zero

The greatest mysteries have a shadowy figure at the center—someone who sets things in motion and holds the key to how the story unfolds.

Book of the Day

Authors Annie Hartnett and Kevin Wilson on writing road trip novels | NPR's Book of the Day

People say that they don't like road trip books. And I thought about why that might be and I do get it and I think it's because you can't use minor characters in the same way that you can in other books and you also can't like place is hard cuz you're moving from place to place. So, every place has to make a big impression. Every character has to be very clear who they are in their your first interaction with them.

Fresh Air

‘Spider-Man’ director Destin Daniel Cretton

I was really interested in having our antagonist be somebody who is younger than Peter, who really represents, in many ways, what young people are going through right now, what young people are feeling. This is a character who can literally jump into other people's minds and experience the lives of other people. But she's also a person who is completely alone in this city, and nobody really knows the real her, you know.

Fresh Air

Jean Smart bids farewell to ‘Hacks’

I can't think of any other movie or TV show that has had a relationship like this one. It just is so nuanced and so deep and so, but also has been fraught with a lot of pain. I mean, that relationship was, it was mother-daughter, it was best friend, it was enemies for a while, it was respectful co-workers.

Fresh Air

Best Of: ‘Odyssey’ translator Emily Wilson / Actor Jon Bernthal

I think if we have a quest narrative, whether it's in a poem, a novel, or a movie, we need to have a protagonist with detailed, believable motivation. He needs to want something. So the fact that these desires seem to be stripped from Odysseus, he doesn't seem to want food, doesn't seem to want sex. What does he want?

Daily Stoic

9 Stoic Habits To Change Your Life

The truth is that virtue is not different than any other skill. You don't have it or not have it. You do it or you don't do it. And you get better at it the more you do it. This is the fundamental insight of Aristotle, that excellence is not innate. It is a habit.

Book of the Day

Judy Blume says she doesn't miss writing … but she’s very glad she wrote

Details in fiction are everything. Even kids write and say, "I like your books because people brush their teeth." I mean, it's that kind of, you know, everyday stuff. And that gives us a bond with the characters.

It's Been a Minute

'New Skin' and the botched quest for beauty | It's Been a Minute

I'm more interested in depicting a reality that I'm more familiar with, which is intergenerational debt, struggling, single parenthood, and it's more interesting to me to write stories with characters who subvert these expectations of what an immigrant and a woman should and can be in America.

Fresh Air

John Lithgow

You look for ways you can empathize with every character. And if you're playing a scoundrel of any stripe, you just try to make it interesting. You try to figure out what made him that way.

Fresh Air

‘Jury Duty’ star James Marden / Remembering Roy Book Binder

What we're doing is we're creating a hero's journey for somebody. And what we're surrounding him with are this cast of bizarre, eccentric weirdos and hopefully carving out a path for him to become the leader at the end and have his 12 Angry Men moment where he inspires us all and unites us and then we pull the curtain back and celebrate him as a human being.

Fresh Air

Benicio del Toro

I think actors look for characters that are layered and by that I mean may contradict themselves. They break the stereotype, let's put it that way, if they contradict themselves.