Jeff Dunham Quotes

I don't really know where my ideas come from. I start with a time and a place. That's what I need to get started, and an intellectual question.

One day I had an idea for a movie. Everything came after that.

Animation is about creating the illusion of life. And you can't create it if you don't have one.

I think the idea of creating a character from scratch, one that has not been done in a novel or an existing story, is immensely exciting, terrifying and ultimately rewarding.

I've never been comfortable with the idea of using family and friends in stories. Which is why it takes me longer than something else. Because you make them up out of nothing. Doing that is harder.

What I'm really trying to do is create unique characters.

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.

Some of my characters are a mixture of various aspects of people I have met. others are pure invention.

I don't think you can teach someone how to come up with good characters or a story.

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

Sometimes I create a character from a scrap - a mere mention that has been left behind.

Writing, even though it's hard work, is really a joy when you get these characters to come alive. It's hard to trace where they come from. I can't say that I am sitting here one night at nine o'clock and that a character occurs to me. The magic for me happens at the typewriter.

I find it really hard to throw myself into something artistically where I'm making up a whole character and finding something for that character to do.

I'm not a craftsman of graphics or art or film. I'm more of an idea generator and manufacturer.

For some reason, all my characters come to me with their names attached to them. I never have to search for the names.

Stories come to me and I don't know where they come from, but afterwards I can look back and say, 'Oh yes, that's got a little bit of me, or a little bit of my own son in it'. That's where ideas come from.

My characters are fictional. I get ideas from real people, sometimes, but my characters always exist only in my head.

The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it.

People sometimes ask who I would cast in my books and I never have any idea. I don't think I could ever write a book thinking of it as a movie the whole time. This would be like building a house and filling it with furniture just so you could have blueprints.

Up until college age I was using the typical little-boy dummy that sits on the knee and makes woodpecker jokes. My first original character didn't happen until later, and that was Jose the Jalapeno on a Stick.

Writing is a mysterious process, and many ideas come from deep within the imagination, so it's very hard to say how characters come about. Mostly, they just happen.

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

I find my characters and stories in many varied places; sometimes they pop out of newspaper articles, obscure historical texts, lively dinner party conversations and some even crawl out of the dusty remote recesses of my imagination.

I like coming up with new characters. Whether it's revamping an old character no one likes or just coming up with brand-new stuff, that's kind of what excited me as an artist.

I just let the character speak to me and things appear.