Robert Crais Quotes

I love all my characters. I love their weaknesses and flaws. I feel like they're all my best friends and I adore being with them.

You spend so much time writing a character the way I did with Buddy Baker and then Green Arrow that you start to care about them. And you almost think of them as people, you know?

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

I suppose it's possible that a writer would have feeling for his characters, but I can't see how, because writing is such a meticulous, intricate, technical business. I wish I could say that I love my characters and that frequently they take over the book and run away with the plot and so on. But they don't exist.

I love reading for a character I have no business reading for.

I'm always sorry to finish a book, to let go of characters I love, people I've struggled to understand for years, people who evolve before me.

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

If I don't fall in love with my characters, I cannot shoot.

I love to evoke the bones and meat and thoughts of characters.

Every writer has characters that they become attached to and that they feel very strongly about.

I really fall in love with my characters, even the bad ones. I love getting together with them. They tell me what to do; they take me on a wild and wonderful trip.

Certain characters get to me and stay with me for a while.

One of the things that happens when you write characters - and maybe this is my own sentimentality - is that I always find I have an instinct to protect them.

I can't really iterate what I look for in a script. It's a very subjective thing. Like an organic attachment you have with the script and characters.

I love all the characters I write.

I love seeing a story evolve over several books and watching characters develop.

I always try to make my characters people, and yet I always want to entertain.

Writing for me is not a premeditated act. It just happens - characters keep coming out of nowhere and doing things I never expected them to do. The most persistent and most productive of these has been Paul Christopher, whom I didn't expect to see again after he appeared in 'The Miernik Dossier.'

I love rewriting because that is where and how you discover the story. It's like you have this skeleton, and you get to put flesh on it and hair and clothes and really wonderful jewelry.

From a writer's standpoint, each character and story presents its own unique challenges and delights. I'm deeply curious about all of my characters, and I love peeling away their layers to see what's underneath their skin, or secreted deep within their hearts.

A certain luxury when you get to writing a novel is to have the space to have your characters just banter.

I did not set out to write another novel. One day I sat down with the thought of trying my hand at a piece of nonfiction, a personal memoir of youth, but over the next several weeks, without intending it, the work began evolving into what has become 'Tomcat in Love.'

You put books out into the world, and people form their own visuals and images and attachments to characters; those characters become part of them, and they have their feelings about them.

I'd love to star in dark drama that audiences could really relate to.

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.