Wes Anderson Quotes

I'm not a method actor, I don't write my character's history or all those kinds of things. I'm more about the 90 percent of the brain that is subconscious. I like to just pick certain pieces, let it soak in, and then let it kind of emerge out.

Whenever I write a novel, music just sort of naturally slips in (much like cats do, I suppose).

Sometimes you have to search for inspiration with characters, and other times, they just drop out of the sky and arrive.

Before I begin a novel I have a strong sense of at least one central character and how the story begins, and a more vague sense of where things may wind up, but at some point, if the novel is any good at all, the story and characters take on lives of their own and take over the book, and the writer has to be open to that.

I have no idea who the characters are, later, their personalities take over anything I might want to do. I end up writing not from my own will, but from theirs-they come alive as I write and make me do things that I couldn't have planned.

I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story.

Writers often say that characters begin to write themselves, and I never used to believe that. I always thought that was complete hogwash.

No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written.

When I wrote for TV, I was always thinking in terms of character and story. After fifteen years, it became hard-wired in me.

If I had a plot that was all set in advance, why would I want go through the agony of writing the novel? A novel is a kind of exploration and discovery, for me at any rate.

I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.

It's my own personal unconscious that ultimately creates the novel's aesthetic facade.

When you're an actor or any kind of artist, you use your life as something to draw from in every experience.

If I had to choose criteria, for me, it's about first the director. I want to be a part of something that's good and intellectually challenging. After the director it's the character and the story. That's the deal for me.

We have that illusion that we are 'deciding' what to make a character do, in order to 'convey our message' or something like that. But, at least in my experience, you are often more like a river-rafting guide who's been paid a bonus to purposely steer your clients into the roughest possible water.

That's the thing about fiction writers: what seems alarming or particular or perverse about them is simply the shape of their brain - they cannot be otherwise.

I always loved the creative process, from 'Shakespeare in Love' to 'Finding Neverland' to 'Basquiat'; whether it's serious, or it's comedic, whether it's the 'inside look' at that, it seems to be a theme of what I do.

I've always written about other artists, or I write my thoughts down, but I've never written a story.

Everything on 'Broad City' that my character has drawn is my stuff from years and years ago.

For as long as I can remember, I was always creating random characters.

Every book is its own experience, the writing of it.

Your brain forms a story and, if you're lucky, there's a line where the story takes over the brain. You don't even know what you have.

One of the things that happens in novels it's almost like a continual debate with yourself. That's why you're writing the book. It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.

I actually take images of things and put them up around the wall and in a room. I set a room aside. It might be colors, it might be animals, or energy and words. And I'll just leave it there, so it begins to work on my subconscious when I think about the character. Which gives me some latitude to be really flexible and spontaneous but within the context of the character and the world of the character without having to think about it. Or I'll look at something or read something and let it work on my subconscious mind.

No author can create a character out of nothing. He must have a model to give him a starting point; but then his imagination goes to work, he builds him up, adding a trait here, a trait there, which his model did not possess.