1. Quotes Under 65 Characters

In today's fast-paced world, sometimes, the most powerful messages come in the smallest packages. Whether you need a quick dose of inspiration, wisdom, or humor, short quotes have the unique ability to resonate deeply and leave a lasting impression. In this collection, we've gathered some of the top quotes under 65 characters that are sure to uplift, motivate, and entertain. Dive in and discover the profound impact that a few well-chosen words can make in your day.

1. “All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes -- characters even -- caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.” - Diane Setterfield

2. “I will go to my grave in a state of abject endless fascination that we all have the capacity to become emotionally involved with a personality that doesn't exist.” - Berkeley Breathed

3. “Writing is hard work, and if anything's true about the process, it's that fact that a good story is hard to find and even trickier to get on paper. What's less romantic than staring alone at a blank screen? And edgy? I've changed the cat little because I didn't know what my characters were going to say next.” - Adam Johnson

4. “When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.” - Ernest Hemingway

5. “But some characters in books are really real--Jane Austen's are; and I know those five Bennets at the opening of Pride and Prejudice, simply waiting to raven the young men at Netherfield Park, are not giving one thought to the real facts of marriage.” - Dodie Smith

6. “A novel must show how the world truly is, how characters genuinely think, how events actually occur. A novel should somehow reveal the true source of our actions.” - Kevin Hood

7. “And the only sign of life is the ticking of the pen, introducing characters to memory like old friends.” - Fish

8. “You take people, you put them on a journey, you give them peril, you find out who they really are.” - Joss Whedon

9. “The journey had been long and dangerous, and along the way he had met countless travelers, many of whom were so amazing that they must certainly rank among the most original and memorable characters in the history of recorded literature. Which is why it's so sad that there's no time to describe them.” - Jason Carter Eaton

10. “Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.” - Ray Bradbury

11. “The characters within a book were, from a certain point of view, identical on some fundamental level ‒ there weren't any images of them, no physical tangibility whatsoever. They were pictures in the reader's head, constructs of imagination and ideas, given shape by the writer's work and skill and the reader's imagination. Parents, of a sort.” - Jim Butcher

12. “If we live long enough, we become caricatures of ourselves.” - John Irving

13. “. . . clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude.” - Virginia Woolf

14. “Writers are in many ways like demi-gods. With one stroke of a pen they can give life to a character, or strike them from existence, with nary a twinge of grief at their passing.” - Steven Lake

15. “I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story.” - G.K. Chesterton

16. “Many of the characters are fools and they're always playing tricks on meand treating me badly.” - Jorges Luis Borges

17. “Sow a thought, and you reap an act;Sow an act, and you reap a habit;Sow a habit, and you reap a character;Sow a character, and you reap a destiny.” - Samuel Smiles

18. “If you treat your characters like people, they'll reward you by being fully developed individuals.” - Don Roff

19. “The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented.” - Milan Kundera

20. “Just me, my music, and the voices in my head.” - Christie Silvers

21. “French Louis Seymour of the West Canada Creek, who knew how to survive all alone in a treacherous wilderness, and Mr. Alfred G. Vanderbilt of New York City and Raquette Lake, who was richer than God and traveled in his very own Pullman car, and Emmie Hubbard of the Uncas Road, who painted the most beautiful pictures when she was drunk and burned them in her woodstove when she was sober, were all ten times more interesting to me than Milton's devil or Austen's boy-crazy girls or that twitchy fool of Poe's who couldn't think of any place better to bury a body than under his own damn floor.” - Jennifer Donnelly

22. “Most people carry their demons around with them, buried down deep inside. Writers wrestle their demons to the surface, fling them onto the page, then call them characters.” - CK Webb

23. “Believe in your character. Animate (or write) with sincerity.” - Glen Keane

24. “But, how do you know if an ending is truly good for the characters unless you've traveled with them through every page?” - Shannon Hale

25. “The best part of the fiction in many novels is the notice that the characters are imaginary.” - Franklin P. Adams

26. “The only characters I ever don't like are ones that leave no impression on me. And I don't write characters that leave no impression on me.” - Lauren DeStefano

27. “I won't do this movie because I don't believe the love story," she told Selznick. "The heroine is an intellectual woman, and an intellectual woman simply can't fall in love so deeply.” - Ingrid Bergman

28. “Stories start in all sorts of places. Where they begin often tells the reader of what to expect as they progress. Castles often lead to dragons, country estates to deeds of deepest love (or of hate), and ambiguously presented settings usually lead to equally as ambiguous characters and plot, leaving a reader with an ambiguous feeling of disappointment. That's one of the worst kinds.” - Rebecca McKinsey

29. “[W]hen I put Jorge in the library I did not yet know he was the murderer. He acted on his own, so to speak. And it must not be thought that this is an 'idealistic' position, as if I were saying that the characters have an autonomous life and the author, in a kind of trance, makes them behave as they themselves direct him. That kind of nonsense belongs in term papers. The fact is that the characters are obliged to act according to the laws of the world in which they live. In other words, the narrator is the prisoner of his own premises.” - Umberto Eco

30. “It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.” - William Faulkner

31. “The principle I always go on in writing a novel is to think of the characters in terms of actors in a play. I say to myself, if a big name were playing this part, and if he found that after a strong first act he had practically nothing to do in the second act, he would walk out. Now, then, can I twist the story so as to give him plenty to do all the way through? I believe the only way a writer can keep himself up to the mark is by examining each story quite coldly before he starts writing it and asking himself it is all right as a story. I mean, once you go saying to yourself, "This is a pretty weak plot as it stands, but if I'm such a hell of a writer that my magic touch will make it okay," you're sunk. If they aren't in interesting situations, characters can't be major characters, not even if you have the rest of the troop talk their heads off about them."(Interview, The Paris Review, Issue 64, Winter 1975)” - P.G. Wodehouse

32. “In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations!"(Letter to Alexander Chekhov, May 10, 1886)” - Anton Chekhov

33. “I see God now as an unimaginative writer of popular fictions, someone who builds stories around sadistic and graceless plots, narratives that exist only to express His terror of a woman's power to choose who and how to love, to redefine love as she sees fit, not as God thinks it ought to be. The author is unworthy of His own characters.” - Joe Hill

34. “The flimsy little protestations that mark the front gate of every novel, the solemn statements that any resemblance to real persons living or dead is entirely coincidental, are fraudulent every time. A writer has no other material to make his people from than the people of his experience ... The only thing the writer can do is to recombine parts, suppress some characterisitics and emphasize others, put two or three people into one fictional character, and pray the real-life prototypes won't sue.” - Wallace Stegner

35. “I'd write of people and places like I knew, and I'd make my characters talk everyday English; and I'd let the sun rise and set in the usual quiet way without much fuss over the fact. If I had to have villains at all, I'd give them a chance, Anne--I'd give them a chance. There are some terrible bad men the world, I suppose, but you'd have to go a long piece to find them...But most of us have got a little decency somewhere in us. Keep on writing, Anne.” - L.M. Montgomery

36. “It's not a romance, it's a love story.” - Sadie Jones

37. “As a writer, I demand the right to write any character in the world that I want to write. I demand the right to be them, I demand the right to think them and I demand the right to tell the truth as I see they are.” - Quentin Tarantino

38. “Among the Huguenots he learned to be gentle and courteous; to bear himself among his elders respectfully, but without fear or shyness; to consider that, while all things were of minor consequence in comparison to the right to worship God in freedom and purity, yet that a man should be fearless of death, ready to defend his rights, but with moderation and without pushing them to the injury of others; that he should be grave and decorous of speech, and yet of a gay and cheerful spirit.” - G. A. Henty

39. “This isn't the road home. This is a road littered with questions that will inevitably lead to an answer.” - Ryan S. Fortney

40. “I spend many hours in conversation with wonderful characters from fantastic books.” - Patti Roberts

41. “I care more about the people in books than the people I see every day.” - Jo Walton

42. “Sometimes I scare myself at how easily I slip inside my mind and live vicariously through these characters.” - Teresa Mummert

43. “I thought about writing the character as male, but then I would be forced to portray him as a woman in a man's body.” - Chris Stocking

44. “Anita Kleinman was a slight woman in her seventies. Her hair was thinning and white with a touch of pink, and was swept back from her face in unbroken waves. She wore a full-length Chinese silk gown covered with bright gold dragons on a blue background. Her fingers were tipped with long red nails and heavy with gold rings. She held out her arms in an expression of welcome and perhaps to show me the full extent of her dragons.” - Frederick Weisel

45. “It is sometimes the minor, not the major, characters in a novel who hold the author's affection longest. It may be that one loses affection for the major characters because they suck off so much energy as one pushes them through their lives.” - Larry McMurtry

46. “...it's not the stories - it's the pain and the joy and the people who stay with you long after the stories are told ...” - John Geddes

47. “I write to keep the characters in my head from driving me crazy.” - A.A. Cheshire

48. “Never annoy an inspirational author or you will become the poison in her pen and the villian in every one of her books.” - Shannon L. Alder

49. “Good story' means something worth telling that the world wants to hear. Finding this is your lonely task...But the love of a good story, of terrific characters and a world driven by your passion, courage, and creative gifts is still not enough. Your goal must be a good story well told.” - Robert McKee

50. “A winner is not someone who wins. It's someone who tries and isn't afraid to lose.” - Nusrat Sultana

51. “But -- my dear, my heart is BROKEN! I have seen the perfect Peter Wimsey. Height, voice, charm, smile, manner, outline of features, everything -- and he is -- THE CHAPLAIN OF BALLIOL!! What is the use of anything? ...I am absolutely shattered by this Balliol business. Such waste -- why couldn't he have been an actor?” - Dorothy L. Sayers

52. “Don't let your ego write checks your character can't cash.another from the world of tweets” - Robin Glasser

53. “Jenny looked, as usual, elegant and as fine-drawn as a young doe, but oddly muted, as if she had been outlined in sepia.” - Anne Rivers Siddons

54. “If you can’t be of good character, write a good character.” - Rosen Trevithick

55. “...you mean you don't fit characters into a plot? excatly...” - John Geddes A Familiar Rain

56. “My characters are quite as real to me as so-called real people; which is one reason why I'm not subject to what is known as loneliness. I have plenty of company.” - William S. Burroughs

57. “You can never know enough about your characters” - W. Somerset Maugham

58. “A novelist's characters must be with him as he lies down to sleep, and as he wakes from his dreams. He must learn to hate them and to love them.” - Anthony Trollopel

59. “If you're silent for a long time, people just arrive in your mind.” - Alice Walker

60. “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

61. “A great number of elements in the characters’ lives, both psychic and factual, are not communicated to us. […] These characters, I believe, enjoy a much greater autonomy than we usually think, and are able to take initiatives unknown both to the writer and the reader. When characters have their own will, their own autonomy, it gives the literary universe a greater internal mobility; it also makes the texts through which we view this world all the more open and incomplete.” - Pierre Bayard

62. “I'm talking about those novels where the characters aren't really interesting and you don't care about them or anything they care about. It's those books I won't read anymore. There's too much else to read--books about people and things that matter, books about life and death.” - Will Schwalbe

63. “It's not hard to read about death abstractly. I do find it tough when a character I love dies, of course. You can truly miss characters. Not like you miss people, but you can still miss them.” - Will Schwalbe

64. “Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blending with the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if it were yourself palpitating beneath their costumes.” - Gustave Flaubert

65. “I have closed my study door on the world and shut myself away with people of my imagination. For nearly sixty years I have eavesdropped with impunity on the lives of people who do not exist. I have peeped shamelessly into hearts and bathroom closets. I have leaned over shoulders to follow the movements of quills as they write love letters, wills and confessions. I have watched as lovers love, murderers murder and childern play their make-believe. Prisons and brothels have opened their doors to me; galleons and camel trains have transported me across sea and sand; centuries and continents have fallen away at my bidding. I have spied upon the misdeeds of the mighty and witnessed the nobility of the meek. I have bent so low over sleepers in their beds that they might have felt my breath on their faces. I have seen their dreams.” - Diane Setterfield