Dwight V. Swain quotes:

To be a writer, a creative person, you must retain your ability to react uniquely. Your feelings must remain your own. The day you mute yourself, or moderate yourself, or repress your proneness to get excited or ecstatic or angry or emotionally involved...that day, you die as a writer.

The core of character lies in each individual story person's ability to care about something; to feel implicitly or explicitly that something is important.