Life & Wisdom Quote by Nora Roberts

A Nora Roberts novel can burn through plot like jet fuel, but what keeps readers turning pages at 2 a.m. is the sense that someone on the other side of the sentence knows people. “The most important aspect of any story, to me, is character” is less a writing tip than a declaration of craft priorities from a working author whose career has been built on consistency, intimacy, and pace.

The phrasing matters: “to me” signals taste, yes, but also authority earned through output. Roberts isn’t auditioning for a workshop; she’s drawing a line between stories that feel engineered and stories that feel inhabited. The subtext is quietly anti-prestige in a way that’s very commercial and very savvy. High-concept premises are easy to pitch, twists are easy to market, but character is what creates rereadability, what turns a paperback into a relationship. In romance especially, character isn’t garnish on top of the plot; it is the plot. The external events exist to pressure the internal ones: fear, desire, pride, the private math people do before they risk being known.

Contextually, Roberts has spent decades in a genre culture often dismissed as formulaic. This sentence pushes back without defensiveness. It reframes “formula” as scaffolding and insists the real work happens in the human specificity inside it. You can swap out settings, jobs, even crimes; you can’t fake the lived-in contradictions that make readers recognize themselves. That’s why it works: it’s a simple claim that doubles as a manifesto for emotional realism.