Dean Koontz Quotes

Whenever I'm writing a book, small details from my life always creep in.

I can only write a book like 'The Tin Drum' or 'From the Diary of a Snail' at a special period of my life. The books came about because of how I felt and thought at the time.

I should tell you that many people think that authors just cut and paste from real life into books. It doesn't work quite that way.

I've always kind of ripped from real life to some degree or at least how I'm feeling in the moment. In fact, maybe that's really it. In anything I've ever written, all the characters sound like me, which I don't think is a bad thing.

Most of my stories, if not all of them, have some basis in real life. That's the kind of fiction I'm most interested in. I suppose that's one reason I don't have much respect for fiction that seems to be game playing.

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.

All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely different medium.

I love sitting at my desk and facing a quiet day with a pen in my hand, and putting myself into a story. It's kind of weird, isn't it? I mean, to absent myself from real life and make up stories is strange, but I started doing this when I was ten years old. It was all I wanted to do.

I have to live my books before I write them.

Even though I don't write about things that come from my life because I'm lucky, and I live in a great place with great kids and, you know, a great husband, I think you can find threads of me in the characters, so that's really what being a writer is, probably.

I've actually always started with what feels most natural. Which is, the people who surround me in my daily life. So, the first show I ever wrote, which is called 'Surface Transit,' was based in part on people I knew from my family. Co-workers, ex-boyfriends. All of that kind of thing.

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.

The idea that an author can extricate her or his own ongoing life experience from the tale being written is a conceit of very little worth.

'Shadowboxer' was based on my life.

The relationship between Cathy and Mom in the strip is the one relationship drawn from real life that I have proudly never even tried to disguise.

Writers are looking for a story. Using your own life as the basis for a story gives it an association with reality that's a wonderful starting point.

What I write about in my novels is also what's in my life.

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.

Find me a first novel that doesn't have parallels with the author's life.

The trite answer is that everything is true but none of it happened. It is emotionally true, but the events, the plotting, the narrative, isn't true of my life, though I've experienced most of the emotions experienced by the characters in the play.

I don't personally look to my own life experiences for answers about how to play a scene.

My mum still says the biggest mistake I ever made was not being Benedict Lloyd-Hughes. She's very upset. But the only one who calls me Benedict in real life is my granny.

I take stuff from real life and try to make a character out of it. And I try to live the world of the characters a little bit.

I always like to write where I'm at in real life into whatever I'm working on.

Whenever I work on a part, I look at the world through the filter of the character and I pick things they might use through my observations of real life.