Michael T. Weiss Quotes

I love all the characters I write.

To combine telling an interesting story with brilliantly written characters is the most difficult thing to do.

I usually don't find myself reacting to my characters. I just create them ... And let the audience decide whether they're empathetic or scared or compelled to cheer me on.

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

One of the challenges is creating characters. I am trying to compose my sentences to express epic events happening to ordinary people.

I do love storytelling.

I'm just trying to create characters and tell stories.

I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.

I just want to tell a good story, so I always ask myself, 'Are these people real to me?'

Any show I'm working on, I want the stories to always be about something, and to have the potential to be emotional. That's the kind of story that I like.

People who actually tell stories, meaning people who write novels and make feature films, don't see themselves as storytellers.

I always say I write my own novels and the characters don't take control of me, but in fact, I look at the characters in the early stages and I think, 'What is he or she like,' and they slowly come together and they become the person they are.

The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about the characters are going through and to experience the moral paradoxes and struggles of being human.

Settings are obviously important - and as a writer, you have to respect what was real at the time of the story you're writing. But the real key to success lies in finding the right characters to carry that story.

So much of what I do... is coming up with new characters and trying to invent voices for them, and to have people fully fleshed out in my head and to know who can say what in the scene and who these characters are... I love it.

I don't really approach stories to make them different from other stuff I've seen, I just try to get into the character, into his or her head. Try to make it as funny, as scary or as wild as I can so that I really like it.

When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him.

Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.

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

I think all characters are facets of the writer. In a way, they have to be if you're going to write them convincingly.

I tend to write one character at a time. But I don't write the entirety of one character at a time.

Your job as a writer is to find storylines, narrative structures, and characters to show the things that you believe rather than saying them or telling them.

I like being a storyteller. I'm bored with myself; I like to write about others. I have a lot of names in my songs: Karen, Margaret, Mary Kay. Even if it's about me, I want to put it through someone else. The music is the soundtrack to the story.

There are so many characters whizzing around inside my head, it's like Looney Tunes. But as soon as I've finished writing about them, I completely forget who they are.

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