Albert Camus Quotes

There is a part of me in every character, naturally. That's why novelists rarely write good autobiographies. You start one and it becomes another novel.

Most writers, I'm afraid, live very boring lives sitting in front of a screen. However, having said that: every writer puts a bit of themselves into the characters to bring them alive.

It's really a misconception to identify the writer with the main character, given that the author creates all the characters in the book. In certain ways, I'm every character. Then again, there is a huge gap between me as a person and what I do in the novel.

Your character that you create in your writing not only represents who you are, but also represents a number of people who you've met along the way.

If you're writing on your own, each character is just you. It's just you.

You learn to write by writing, and by reading and thinking about how writers have created their characters and invented their stories. If you are not a reader, don't even think about being a writer.

Okay, this is Fran Lebowitz. She gave an interview once for the Paris Review about trying to write fiction and saying that fiction writers start talking about how characters are talking to them, and it's crazy, she's never had that. And I also thought, I'm never gonna be able to do this, because I didn't feel that for a really long time.

When I'm writing it's as if I'm the observer. It's as if that computer screen there -it used to be the typewriter - just kind of dissolves and there's this whirling tunnel of mist and there's a kind of proscenium arch, and then there are my characters, and they say what they say, and I laugh sometimes in surprise at what they say.

I very much write from characters. Those people start speaking, and then I have them in the house with me and I live with them. Then at some point, it's time to get them out of the house. You can only live with someone like Dr. Georgeous Teitelbaum from THE SISTERS ROSENSWEIG for so long, and then it's time for her to go. But it is very like having the company of these people and trying to craft them in some way into a story.

When you write a novel, you make other people see your imaginary friends.

Being an author means, almost by definition, that you make up characters and then complicate their lives. That's it, really. You make up characters and give them problem after problem after problem.

People are always thinking that I'm the main character in my books, but each one has been different, and sometimes they've been men.

Novelists embody plural selves all the time. What are characters, after all, if not other selves?

All of my characters, I feel, have some essence of who I am in them.

... characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.

I've never been able to write a book without one very strong character in my rucksack.

I think anybody who is writing finds he puts a little bit of himself in all of the characters, at least in this kind of a strip. It's the only way that you can survive when you have to do something every day. You have to put yourself, all of your thoughts, all of your observations and everything you know into the strip.

The truth of it is, writers do have peculiar relationships with their characters. They are our children in more senses than one. They are born of our imaginations, carry much of ourselves in them, and embody whatever dreams we dream of immortality.

When I'm writing novels, even screenplays, it's never an actor I have in mind; it's always the version in my head of who the character is. Once somebody gets cast, I have to adjust a little bit to who they are.

I write about relationships and I try to create real-life characters.

One nourishes one's created characters with one's own substance: it's rather like the process of gestation. To give the character life, or to give him back life, it is of course necessary to fortify him by contributing something of one's own humanity, but it doesn't follow from that that the character is I, the writer, or that I am the character. The two entities remain distinct.

I never started from ideas but always from character.

I really become the characters when I'm writing them. I'll become one or two of them more than others, I'm consistent that way.

I see myself as a novelist, period. I mean, the material I work with is what is classified as science fiction and fantasy, and I really don't think about these things when I'm writing. I'm just thinking about telling a story and developing my characters.

There is always something of the writer in the work but I don't think Melville had to be swallowed by a whale to write a great novel. If I had lived the lives of all the characters of the songs I've written, that would truly be an extraordinary story.