Lisa Jewell Quotes

That's the way I will write characters, put a fair amount of myself in them, and then everyone else who was like that person, I will pick and choose.

Every character a writer creates has some of themselves in it somewhere.

The point of my explanation is I'm very subjective when it comes to describing my characters: they are all a little bit a part of me from the outside in or the inside out - but to put your mind at ease, I built Paul Snider from the outside in.

My characters are all made up of pieces of people I have known, their backstories pieces of mine.

My characters are based on people I know, but not in a direct way.

There are bits of me in all my characters.

They are imaginary characters. But perhaps not solely the products of my imagination, since there are some aspects of the characters that relate to my own experience of a wide variety of people.

I think every character I've ever come up with has been based on someone or something I've known.

There are always certain things that you tap into, your own personal experiences, and I try to base my characters on someone I know or someone I've seen.

For the most part, there's so much of me in my characters.

Most of my characters are an amalgamation of people that I've met, my family, or myself. Being a writer, you can draw only from what you know. I am lucky to have really rich and interesting people in my family for, you know, interesting family nights and great characters.

All of my characters tend to be montages of different people I've met: little bits and pieces of their personalities put together.

I don't like to analyze what I do too much, but I certainly never meet a single person and say, 'You're the next character.' People think that's what I do. They also think that I sit down and observe and try to imitate random people. I've never done that at all.

Sometimes a character is really based on research that you do. Other times it's just based on your imagination or perhaps your conversation with the director. Or sometimes all of the above. It depends on the movie and character.

I think every writer will tell you that their characters are always partially themselves: who I am and what I've experienced. It's always there in part of my characters.

I don't base any character on a real person, and really don't do composites either. I make them up.

Something about your life always makes its way into your stories. That's just the nature of the beast.

What I do when I create a character is put in details from all the people I know who might be like that person, and then put in a huge amount of myself.

I don't really base any of my characters on specific people that I know, although my characters are informed by the kind of people who live in my community.

I often draw from people in my own experience to base a character on, going back to my days with Mike Leigh.

One of the ways I think I gain fodder for characters is by watching people.

I started improvising the Cliff character, based on someone I grew up with.

I never base characters on real people. There are people who do that but I really don't know how to do it.

The characters in my stories, whether historical or fictional, usually prove to be a compilation of influences taken from differing sources, but never drawn from one model.

Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.