“I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.”

— Jane Austen on Emma

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“Some of my characters are, no doubt, pretty beastly, but I really don’t care, they are outside my inner self like the mournful monsters of a cathedral façade — demons placed there merely to show they have been booted out. Actually, I’m a mild old gentleman who loathes cruelty.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

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“I try to duplicate in fiction the complex, contradictory, and infuriating people I meet on the other side of my study door. When fiction works, readers can develop the same nuanced, conflicted relationships to characters that they have to their own friends and family. I’m less concerned that you love my characters than that you recognise them. Human beings have rough edges. Authors who write exclusively about ethical, admirable, likeable characters are not writing about real people.”

— Lionel Shriver