Jeanette Winterson Quotes

Imagination, it turns out, is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character's actions or lines are truer than others.

I think the idea of creating a character from scratch, one that has not been done in a novel or an existing story, is immensely exciting, terrifying and ultimately rewarding.

Drama and comedy, to me, are all about being surprising, coherent, and true, all at once.

I love a mask. It's why I've got a thing about good writing. When you're acting, you're going into someone else's work. You're behind his words; it's not you.

Once I started to value and respect my characters, I could really hear them. I just let them start talking.

Most fiction writers are driven to find their own 'voice,' but I am more interested in the voices of others.

I think the best actors do both. I think they fulfill what you want them to do, in terms of the vision for the whole piece. And then they always bring something that does surprise you and shock you.

I'm always excited about stories that allow me to explore a character and create interesting stories and worlds that we haven't seen before.

To me, no matter who you're casting for what role, if something's authentic, usually you can mine something good there.

I know that me personally I'm different than anyone else, just like our mothers all tell us we're all very special and unique and we are, and I think if an actor can stick to trying to make the character resemble something from their own spirit it will automatically be unique.

Listen to the way people talk. If your characters sound real the rest is easy.

You, quote, find your voice, unquote, when you are able to invent this one character who resembles you, obviously, and probably is more like you than anyone else on earth, but is not the equivalent to you.

I try to be really, really specific, because each character is really an individual and you have to find out what makes them unique.

I think everything you do, characters I always find, have their own voices and once you establish who that character is you find a different voice. I think it's just a question of establishing that character and the voice speaks through that character.

When I write characters, I need to hear their voice. As soon as I get them speaking, and I feel how they use language, I understand who they are and what they want.

I think in every character there are aspects of yourself that you bring to it. But then it would be really boring to just play yourself.

I think my biggest problem, though, at least in drafts, is not repeating myself. After eight books I get worried that a character or piece of dialog might be too much like something I've already done. So it's a challenge to keep it fresh.

Go where the pleasure is in your writing. Go where the pain is. Write the book you would like to read. Write the book you have been trying to find but have not found. But write. And remember, there are no rules for our profession. Ignore rules. Ignore what I say here if it doesn't help you. Do it your own way. Every writer knows fear and discouragement. Just write.The world is crying for new writing. It is crying for fresh and original voices and new characters and new stories. If you won't write the classics of tomorrow, well, we will not have any.

I feel like they're different creatures, live and in the studio, but that's what makes it so interesting to me. If they didn't have any different shadings or colors, you might as well be a hologram or something.

The bad novelist constructs his characters; he directs them and makes them speak. The true novelist listens to them and watches them act; he hears their voices even before he knows them.

That author who draws a character, even though to common view incongruous in its parts, as the flying-squirrel, and, at differentperiods, as much at variance with itself as the caterpillar is with the butterfly into which it changes, may yet, in so doing, be not false but faithful to facts.

Everybody talks about finding your voice. Do your homework and your voice will find you.

All good dialogue perhaps deals with something unprecedented.

I let my characters do the talking, simple as that.

It was seriously just a name. They didn’t tell you what to do. They didn’t tell you how they wanted the character to be - nothing. You went in to audition for this character name and that was it. When I started, before I came onto the set, I went to Gene Roddenberry and said: hey, what do you want from this guy? Who is he? And being as smart as he is, he said: don’t listen to what you’ve heard or read or seen in the past, nothing. Just make the character your own. And that’s what I did.