Henry Zebrowski Quotes

I believe that if writers want their readers to care about a character, they have to care themselves. I have to root for a detective who screws up as much as Thorne does, who shares my birthday, my North London stomping ground, and my love of country music, both alt and cheesy.

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.

I get very involved in my characters. Sometimes I have a very hard time separating my characters from my life.

The funny thing is that I feel close to all my characters. Deep, deep inside them all.

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 like to think I put some of myself in every character.

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

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.

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

I guess, as an actor, you have to bring something personal to the character - you've got to identify and love one element of the character, or else you can't really inhabit and find ownership.

I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think happens in a child's mind, without him even knowing he has aspirations as a writer.

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 can escape into a character.

Sometimes I can't get out of the character because the story is very intense.

I always believed in my characters. I lived them.

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.

A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children. Sadly, being taught literature often destroys the life of the books.

Quite casually I wander into my plot, poke around with my characters for a while, then amble off, leaving no moral proved and no reader improved.

In terms of the characters I think are really fun to play, a lot of times it's someone in my head saying 'I know that woman.'

I have always loved story - I escaped within it as a child, I read every day, I love figuring out the complex layers of an author's work.

But there's the paradox of fiction - why do you cry when a fake character dies? It's the basis of art. You engage with people who don't exist and care about them as you would your friends and relatives.

One of my biggest goals, especially with writing YA novels, is just to have people enjoy reading.

I have this horrible weakness. I fall in love with my characters. 'Suspect' started as a one-shot, but I just love Maggie so much, and I love Maggie and Scott and what they have going.

There are characters that become more popular as we fall in love with them.