Irene Dunne Quotes

If I don't fall in love with my characters, I cannot shoot.

Characters are not created on paper or laptop alone.

I get very involved in my characters. Sometimes I have a very hard time separating my characters from my life.

The great thing about writing is that you always put yourself in the shoes of the character. If you're doing it right, you can see into the heart of all your characters. Usually, when there's a writing problem, it's because you aren't doing that.

I have to have a character worth caring about. I tend not to start writing books about people I don't have a lot of sympathy for because I'm just going to be with them too long.

As a writer, I always think about who my prototype actors are, in my brain. It's helpful, as a writer, to think about that.

When I create characters, I create a world to inhabit and they begin to feel very real for me. I don't belong in a psych ward, I don't think, but they become very real, like my own family, and then I have to say goodbye, close the door, and work on other things.

What I look for in any character, good or bad, is whether I can hear him speak. If I can imagine him that clearly, then I can write about him.

There's some of me in all my characters.

There are fragments of me in all my characters.

I don't ever really know where I get my characters from.

I take little bits and pieces of ideas that I may or may not believe in but I give them to this character and he runs with them. I have fun with however he handles the situation.

I always try to make my characters people, and yet I always want to entertain.

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

It's usually easier for me to begin writing in a character's voice if that person is different from me in some significant way.

How I work is I work from of very character-driven place. And I trust the writers.

I suppose it's possible that a writer would have feeling for his characters, but I can't see how, because writing is such a meticulous, intricate, technical business. I wish I could say that I love my characters and that frequently they take over the book and run away with the plot and so on. But they don't exist.

When you write, you hear the characters speaking to you as you take dictation from what they say. And obviously, they had particular personalities when you hear them.

Whichever character I'm using and wherever I am in my mind dictates what kind of story I'm going to tell.

I never have particular actors planned when I'm in the process of writing.

It is a wonderful thing in the process of writing when such paper characters are first sketched, and, when one is doing good work, from a certain point in time they come alive and start contradicting the author as well.

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.

Especially when I write, I want to get out of people's heads and have them speak and have them get dressed and have them go to work.

When you create a show, and create characters, these people are like children to you.

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