Danai Gurira Quotes

All of my novels are seeded in real life events, and 'The Wreckage' is no different.

The characters in my stories, whether historical or fictional, usually prove to be a compilation of influences taken from differing sources, but never drawn from one model.

Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.

My characters are fictional. I get ideas from real people, sometimes, but my characters always exist only in my head.

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.

I tend to wait for true stories to mature into fiction. Most of my fiction grew out of a long-germinating real-life situation.

I take in a lot of stuff from real life, movies, television, news and it all gets mixed in my head and somehow turns into a story idea.

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

There's not a strong autobiographical strain in my fiction. A few bits of fact here and there.

Being a novelist is the adult version of a kid creating a make-believe world. But unlike a child, a writer of fiction has to come up with a structured story, one that has as much meaning for others as it has for her.

When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.

I'll often dream about characters before I start writing their stories.

All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely different medium.

What do you do in a novel? You take recognizable characters from your own life, and you fantasize about what they're really like.

Successful fiction does not need to be validated by 'real life'; I cringe whenever a writer is asked how much of a novel is 'real'.

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

I think every character I've ever come up with has been based on someone or something I've known.

It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

As a writer of fiction, I spend my days inventing real lives for make-believe people; what I create can only seem real.

I tell stories. I kind of stumbled on that by trying to combine Jane Austen and magic.

Writing fiction, I really just sit there and it just comes.

I always start from scratch with a character - they're never based on anyone else. You get ideas of what people look like, and I'm a great people watcher. You can draw inspiration from people.

I feel like reading really defined me as a writer because I lived my life outside of my own body for so much of my life and I loved it. I've always been a reader. I think living all those stories served me to naturally take that next step to creating.

I take stuff from real life and try to make a character out of it. And I try to live the world of the characters a little bit.