Elmore Leonard Quotes

When you write, you hear the characters speaking to you as you take dictation from what they say. And obviously, they had particular personalities when you hear them.

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

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.

I'm at the mercy of whatever character comes into my head.

When I'm writing a story, which takes me a year or more, I can feel my character living with me - they're responding to whatever funny, familial, or social situation I'm in, and I think about their responses constantly.

I don't base any character on a real person, and really don't do composites either. I make them up.

I try to talk about things I know about. But my characters are more of a combination of people or how I imagine people would feel.

You can't really write until the characters kind of show up one day and tell you what they're going to say. You start to hear the rhythm of the way the people talk, and then it becomes easier.

Most of the time, when I'm writing, I'm writing for myself. I'm thinking, 'What will my character say at this time? What will come out of her mouth?' I create individuals so real to me, I sometimes start talking to them. Then I let them loose on the page.

My characters are all made up of pieces of people I have known, their backstories pieces of mine.

I don't really base any of my characters on specific people that I know, although my characters are informed by the kind of people who live in my community.

I wrote a story about a character who looks like Harry Styles. But it has nothing to do with Harry Styles at all.

They [my characters]speak to me all the time! In fact some of them never shut up!

In all my characters, I try to find an iota of myself, and in Castle, I found a lot. He gets away with a lot, so that's fun.

The interesting thing about fiction from a writer's standpoint is that the characters come to life within you. And yet who are they and where are they? They seem to have as much or more vitality and complexity as the people around you.

I just love to be able to actually build a character.

I started improvising the Cliff character, based on someone I grew up with.

Sometimes a character is really based on research that you do. Other times it's just based on your imagination or perhaps your conversation with the director. Or sometimes all of the above. It depends on the movie and character.

I never base characters on real people. There are people who do that but I really don't know how to do it.

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

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.

Very few of my characters are based on people I've known. It is too constricting.

They are imaginary characters. But perhaps not solely the products of my imagination, since there are some aspects of the characters that relate to my own experience of a wide variety of people.

What I look for in any character, good or bad, is whether I can hear him speak. If I can imagine him that clearly, then I can write about him.

One of the things about writing fiction is that you create people that you feel, more or less, as though you know.