S. E. Hinton Quotes

I like to write first-person because I like to become the character I'm writing.

Part of me becomes the characters I'm writing about. I think readers feel like they are there, the way I am, as a result.

As I write, I try to be the character.

You can escape into a character.

In terms of the character itself, I can't really say that I find anything really difficult. I enjoy the character so much I don't perceive difficulty in trying to be him. It's just a matter of how do we get there.

That balance between involvement and detachment is what novelists do. It's the ideal relationship between a novelist and a character, I think, total involvement and identity and empathy, stopping short of being autobiographical - in my case, anyway - but also quite detached.

The main characters for 'The Seer and the Sword' made an appearance one night and then haunted me for over five years before I began to write them down. Does that count as inspiration? For me, characters tend to show up, stay on to help with the work of writing their stories, and then occasionally deign to visit after a book is finished.

When I'm writing fiction, I'm sort of interested by the fact that somehow or other I can have the feeling of actually seeing things through someone else's eyes.

The whole trick is to make it feel like you're spying on real people's lives as they get through the day. When I'm writing, I have to trick myself as a writer. If I consciously say, 'I'm writing,' I feel all this pressure and somehow it doesn't feel as real as when it doesn't seem to count as much.

I can inhabit any character in a way that is difficult to do successfully in a contemporary novel.

There's a challenge to playing these fantasy figures because they are fantasy figures. You have to enter into this sort of imaginative world of the writer.

My life needed to be saved. Not just Foxy. That's my character. That's my work. Inga is a person.

In the process of developing a character, you do, in fact, start to take him on as a personality.

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

One has to be able to twist and change and distort characters, play with them like clay, so everything fits together. Real people don't permit you to do that.

I write a ridiculous number of drafts. The characters change and grow through the drafting, and my understanding of them deepens. Creating characters in a novel is like shooting at clay pigeons and missing, and then missing more productively as the narrative continues.

I really like getting inside the heads of female characters. I think I can do that well, and I enjoy it.

In the biographical novel, there's only one person involved. I, the author, spend two to five years becoming the main character. I do that so by the time you get to the bottom of Page 2 or 3, you forget your name, where you live, your profession and the year it is. You become the main character of the book. You live the book.

Acting allows me to explore new worlds, to discover characters by delving into their lives, and ultimately to become someone else entirely.

Writing is like a rollercoaster ride for me, an adventure. I love exploring the world through 'playing' people who are absolutely nothing like me.

When you have a character to work with, you carry them around in a strange way - they make you look at the world in a different way.

Keats himself spoke about how Shakespeare was capable of erasing himself completely from the characters he had created. As an actor, that is what I'm trying to do.

You live vicariously through your characters.

Sometimes I write from the point of view of characters whom I would dislike as people, not as a perverse exercise, but because this cracks the story open and makes me see it in a way I would not see it naturally.

I can't help slightly falling in love with every character I write about. And I quite like writing about people who are vilified.