Art & Creativity Quote by Thomas Perry

Perry’s line is a small manifesto for character work that prizes sound over synopsis. He’s not talking about “relatable” heroes or villains with tidy arcs; he’s talking about voice as the proof of life. “Whether I can hear him speak” treats a character like a track you can’t unhear once the hook lands. If the cadence is there - the diction, the hesitations, the bravado, the private logic - the rest of the writing problem gets easier, because the character starts generating choices on their own.

The sly subtext is that morality is secondary to specificity. “Good or bad” dismisses the usual cultural sorting hat and replaces it with a more ruthless test: clarity. In an era of pitch-ready loglines and algorithm-friendly archetypes, Perry’s standard is almost anti-industrial. He’s saying: don’t outline a person into existence; audition them. If you can’t hear them, you’re probably building a puppet that will only say what the author needs.

Coming from a musician, the intent clicks. Musicians understand that meaning rides on delivery - the same lyric can land as confession, threat, or joke depending on phrasing. Perry imports that sensibility into storytelling: dialogue isn’t decoration, it’s instrument. The quote also hints at an ethics of attention. To “hear him” is to grant even a villain full interior volume, not to excuse them, but to render them convincingly human. That’s why it works: it reframes craft as an act of listening, and it quietly warns that without that listening, you’re not writing characters - you’re writing positions.