Penelope Lively Quotes

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

I don't ever really know where I get my characters from.

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

I mean, can I really create a full, three-dimensional character? I don't know anymore. I'm certainly going to try.

To create characters, one must build background. And one of the tools we use is improvisation.

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.

When you're creating a character out of nothing, you have to make all the guesses as to how they walk, how they talk, how they think. It was all there on the table for us to pick and choose for Murrow.

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

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.

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

What I'm really trying to do is create unique characters.

You invent this massive lagoon of information without any pressure to do anything apart from create this person, a person that might fit the bill that is the character that is emerging from the research.

I love creating new characters that are whatever they are.

When I write a book, characters come to life for me somewhere at the back of my head. I strive to make them flesh and blood in an abstract way, in words.

I came into this business to create characters that moved people and told stories.

Characters are not created on paper or laptop alone.

There is no creative process to come up with a character of Dean Ambrose.

I'm interested in characters. I love them, and I love to write them.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

Outside books, we avoid colorful characters.

What makes characters real are details, and if you're crafting a person from scratch, you're probably not going to pay as much attention to a question like, 'Does this person bite their nails?'

I love... What's gratifying to me is when you make/create a character and a human being, a person who lives entirely and who has their own existence, just merely from the words on a page.

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

I tend to spend a lot of time building characters that the reader will believe in and sympathize with.