Jim Jarmusch Quotes

My process seems to be unusual in the sense that I don't create worlds before characters. With me, character is king.

What I loved about romances was the character, and I think I still bring that to my novels. What romance taught me was that the 'who' will always matter more than the 'what.' It's fun to come up with plots, but I want to make sure the reader cares about who it's happening to.

Most of my films have been very character driven.

I'm more interested in character than events. I've observed that about myself as a writer. I find events, even the most dramatic sort, not to be such fertile ground.

I definitely feel that plot flows from character. I don't believe that you can construct a plot and insert people into it.

There is no 'right' way to begin a novel, but for me, plot has to wait. The character comes first.

The story is always in service to the characters, and is only as long or short, or neat or ragged as it needs to be.

I'm not really a plot writer - I'm more interested in the characters and sort of small events that propel the story forward.

My stories are character driven.

Conventional forms of narrative allow for different points of view, but for this book I wanted a structure whereby each of the main characters contributed a distinctive version of the story.

Certainly it's very difficult to keep momentum going through a film which has as many characters as this does, and the piece took on a life of its own to try and shape it. That took all the time we had in editing.

I never outline my novels before I write. I do have a vague sense of beginning, middle, and end at the outset of each book, but for me, writing has always been a very character-driven process.

A lot of the struggle I had with movies is I really loved moments and tones and feelings in a scene, and I loved creating those, but I never really had great stories to string them together.

I never really approach any project or story thinking of themes first or what a certain character 'represents.' Maybe other writers do, but for me, it just starts with the characters and a certain emotion I want to convey. It usually isn't until I get deeper into a book and look back a bit that I start to see the themes, etc.

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

The instant that movies became described as character driven was the instant when characters stopped mattering in movies. In other words, the birth of the notion of the character-driven movie coincided with the birth of movies in which characters were incidental to the very activities in which they engaged.

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.

Writing 'when you find me,' it really exposed me to a way of putting together a story I hadn't thought of.

Every day, I learn something new. I think one of the most exciting things for a writer is to work on a TV show. It's like a novel. You have a really long time to develop and learn about the characters, and you can just really keep digging in deeper, every week.

I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.

I don't really set out to explore grand themes. I set out to tell a story. And one I have to be able to imagine right through.

Once a novel gets going and I know it is viable, I don't then worry about plot or themes. These things will come in almost automatically because the characters are now pulling the story.

Well, I must tell you I write the scripts very close to the bone. So I'm writing episode seven now and couldn't tell you what happens in episode eight.

I can't really write anything without knowing the ending. I don't know how people do that. Even with my superhero stuff, I have to know at least where I want to take the characters and what the ending of my story with them will be. I just can't structure stories or character arcs and stuff without knowing the endpoint.

One of the reasons I started working at 'South Park,' actually, was that I wanted to learn how to structure things and how to tell a story.