Allan Massie Quotes

Writers are magpies, and we collect details about people and we use them for fictional characters.

I never base characters on real people - you can get into so much trouble that way!

I think because I write so many short stories, it's not that hard to come up with characters that are not me.

You spend so much time writing a character the way I did with Buddy Baker and then Green Arrow that you start to care about them. And you almost think of them as people, you know?

I love... What's gratifying to me is when you make/create a character and a human being, a person who lives entirely and who has their own existence, just merely from the words on a page.

The characters in my stories all have quite loud lives in my head. It's a relief to get them on the page. Often they come from people I've noticed or overheard - but that is only a part of them. It's only by writing that I discover who these people really are.

You're on your own with the book. And while you are writing fiction, you're spending all this time with people who don't actually exist, which is just madness.

I don't have a clear biography of my own that I could recount in an interesting way. I'm made up of the characters that I pulled out of my head, that I invented.

Characters I create are just mixtures of the people I know.

It doesn't matter whether characters are real people or not; if they're not vivid on the page, then the reader doesn't care about them that much, and, if the reader doesn't care about them that much, then they don't care what happens to them.

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

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.

My only obligation is to my characters. And they came from where I have been.

They [my characters]speak to me all the time! In fact some of them never shut up!

I write characters that are based on elements of people I know and experiences I've really had.

The flimsy little protestations that mark the front gate of every novel, the solemn statements that any resemblance to real persons living or dead is entirely coincidental, are fraudulent every time. A writer has no other material to make his people from than the people of his experience ... The only thing the writer can do is to recombine parts, suppress some characterisitics and emphasize others, put two or three people into one fictional character, and pray the real-life prototypes won't sue.

That's been my main interest for the last 15 years, is to really make sure the story and the characters take precedence over everything else, and that I give them everything I can to make them exist as actual people.

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

You must learn to be three people at once: writer, character, and reader.

When I first started out, I was trying to write stories about nurses and lawyers and a lot of people I didn't know anything about, and they just weren't working.

I think "honest" sometimes gets used to describe a real depiction of real life. I don't think that's necessarily what we're doing. We created these fake characters and we're just trying to figure out what they would do in situations they enter into.

The movies I make tend not to be quite reality but the characters are inspired by real people and they're always very personal.

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.

Most characters are composed of snippets here and there of people I've known, and all rolled into the character I've created. They do become like their own people.

I don't think about the stories so much, as the characters themselves. They live on, and they are almost as real as I am.