Giving Characters Life

In literature, as in our dreams, death does not exist. Take, for example, the case of Anna Karenina. This book was written more than a hundred years ago but you don't say "the late Anna Karenina" or "the late Madame Bovary" or "the late Flaubert." They are alive. If the writer manages to imbue them with life, then they, together with their author, live forever. When people ask me, "Why do you write about a vanished world?" I answer, "Whether a hero is alive today and will be dead twenty years from now, or whether he died twenty years ago or two thousand years ago‑if the writer has given him life, he or she will be a living part of human conciousness.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer