Eudora Welty Quotes

In terms of style, I think the memoirist should have a novelist's skill and all the elements of a novelist's toolbox. When I read a memoir, I want to really, deeply experience what the author experienced. I want to see the characters and hear the way they speak and understand how they think. And so in that way, writing a memoir feels similar to writing a novel.

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.

The art of the novel is to arrive at that artless point where your characters become more real than yourself.

You try to make characters you care about, and I think realism helps. Even though this is a high concept, the characters have got to be real.

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.

I'm not in the business of meddling with people's destinies - and yes, my characters are real people to me. They have histories and thoughts and yearnings and hurts and misgivings and pleasures that don't belong to me.

I think that, as a writer, while it's your job to construct stories, you have to navigate your way through them with your heart.

When you're writing a story or an actor playing a role, you should never think of your characters as heroes or villains. You have to think of them as people first.

Chris Claremont once said of Alan Moore, "if he could plot, we'd all have to get together and kill him." Which utterly misses the most compelling part of Alan's writing, the way he develops and expresses ideas and character. Plot does not define story. Plot is the framework within which ideas are explored and personalities and relationships are unfolded.

When you start writing the magic comes when the characters seem to take on a life of their own and write the words for themselves.

A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins.

What I do in the writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself. It is the act of a writer's imagination that I set the most high.

I love writing from enclosed spaces: you really learn about your characters when they have tight walls to push against.

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.

I think my very earliest stories were all intellectual exercises and I was writing from experiences I had never had about characters who were about an inch deep.

I think there's a real connection between acting and writing novels because the way I write characters has a little bit to do with the method acting that I was taught in high school and college.

I remember when I was a kid, I loved Sherlock Holmes. I thought Arthur Conan Doyle was one of the greatest writers, because I felt I knew Sherlock Holmes. He existed to me. When I went to England the first thing I did was go to Baker Street to look for his house. I think you've got to try to make all of your characters as empathetic and realistic as possible.

I believe in characters that can be tangible, and that you can actually relate to.

Get too conceptual, too cute and remote, and your characters die on the page.

The best books come from someplace deep inside.... Become emotionally involved. If you don't care about your characters, your readers won't either.

Character, I think, is the single most important thing in fiction. You might read a book once for its interesting plot—but not twice.

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.

What I try to do in writing any character is to put myself in his position.

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.