Amanda Burton Quotes

Characters I create are just mixtures of the people I know.

There's no game plan when it comes to thinking up new characters; inspiration can come from anything - from a wig I've seen to an expression I've heard someone use.

A lot of times characters are combinations of people I come across in life. I people-watch a lot.

The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see - every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties.

You hear many things, take a little from each experience, and tune your imagination to create believable characters and situations.

I sort of love reading the scripts and going, 'Oh wow, what a great idea. I never would have thought of that.'

A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

You can draw inspiration from anything. If you're a good storyteller, you can take a dirty look somebody gives you, or if a guy you used to have flirtations with starts dating a new girl, or somebody you're casually talking to says something that makes you so mad - you can create an entire scenario around that.

I think that writers of literary fiction would do well to read more books for children.

I create fictional narratives, but it's based on literal people.

Quite often, little germs of ideas have come from something that I've observed or someone's told me. The process of it becoming fiction is expanding and extending it: stretching the rubber band of reality.

Imagination, it turns out, is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character's actions or lines are truer than others.

Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.

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.

With me, writing is 60% imagination, 30% people you know and 10% you don't know where it comes from.

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'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them.

It's great fun if you get a good piece of writing and you can pretend to be someone else, tell a story that needs to be told, make some kind of connection. I've always fancied myself as a leading man, but I really doubt whether anyone else sees me that way.

I get ideas for my books from people I know and what happens to them, from places I've been and what happens to me, and from things I read.

I work out the other bits, too, but I need to know what I look like, very early on. And then it's like a template; I'll fill that person out. If I get that out of the way, then I'm all right.

A script can just be a blueprint, and you've got to go in and build it and color it in and paint it.

As a writer, you look for inspiration wherever you can get it.

As a storyteller, when you see somebody who is the character you envisioned, you feel this energy in the room.

Something people say about acting is that acting is listening. But I think that writing is listening, too. That you really have to listen to what are they saying and what they're communicating to you. And so, a lot of it is just getting stuff down.

I admit I do develop characters from little parts of things I've seen others do.