A. S. Byatt Quotes

One of the things about writing fiction is that you create people that you feel, more or less, as though you know.

A character takes shape in the act of writing. You start with something, and you add or subtract.

I love making characters real and believable, through my own experience and choices.

I don't really base any of my characters on specific people that I know, although my characters are informed by the kind of people who live in my community.

Characters are not created on paper or laptop alone.

I love all the characters I write.

When I was writing my first novel, 'Elizabeth is Missing,' I was writing the only novel I had ever written and writing about the only protagonist I'd ever written about. Because of this, I didn't think of her as a construct. Maud was real.

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.

The writer of stories or of novels settles on men and imitates them; he exhausts the possibilities of his characters.

It's hard to know whether certain characters come to life or not, they either come to have their own life or they don't. I've written many things in which the characters just remain inert.

In 'Me Before You,' the two characters popped into my head fully formed, which is really strange and unusual. Other books, I sit on them for two or three months. I have a whole routine: I buy a nice book; I hand-write all their characteristics. I put them through little tests just to see how they would react to things.

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.

I try to build a full personality for each of our cartoon characters - to make them personalities.

I really enjoy working in genre series, because you really have to create the characters.

Most good fiction also has a character the writer seems to know more deeply than anyone can actually be known in life, but a few unusual writers can make something great without that.

I like to take a character and develop it.

Characters are the key to a good book. It took me several novels to comprehend that.

Whether writing fiction or nonfiction, I've never had the sense I was 'making up' a character. It feels more like watching people reveal themselves, ever more deeply, more intimately.

You establish a technique on how to develop characters. Everyone does it their own way, and that's what makes it fun.

I have a huge emotional attachment to characters I've created, especially the viewpoint characters.

Most of the time, when I'm writing, I'm writing for myself. I'm thinking, 'What will my character say at this time? What will come out of her mouth?' I create individuals so real to me, I sometimes start talking to them. Then I let them loose on the page.

Novelists embody plural selves all the time. What are characters, after all, if not other selves?

That's one of those things that will really hurt me personally, if I label a character or think about what it might do if it were to do well. I just try to do a good job with it.

In creative writing, I teach that characters arise out of our need for them.

I love creating new characters that are whatever they are.