Nick Harkaway Quotes

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.

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

As a writer, I always think about who my prototype actors are, in my brain. It's helpful, as a writer, to think about that.

I very seldom, very seldom, even know what my characters look like.

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

For some reason, all my characters come to me with their names attached to them. I never have to search for the names.

Cool? Am I cool? I don't know, but I hope my characters are cool, in the sense of iconic. That's my job, at its very essence.

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

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.

I always say I write my own novels and the characters don't take control of me, but in fact, I look at the characters in the early stages and I think, 'What is he or she like,' and they slowly come together and they become the person they are.

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.

I put a lot of myself into my characters when I write.

I do this a lot with names. I'll start with a name, and then for some reason he won't talk much, or he's older than I pictured him just because of a name I give him. So then I finally get the right name, and I can't shut the guy up. This always happens. There's always a character who gives me trouble that way.

A lot of times characters are combinations of people I come across in life. I people-watch a lot.

All characters come from people I know, but after the initial inspiration, I tend to modify the characters so they fit with the story.

I love inventing names, but I also collect unusual names, so that I can look through my notebook and choose one that suits a new character.

I suppose it's easier for most writers to create and vivify characters of their own gender.

Novelists embody plural selves all the time. What are characters, after all, if not other selves?

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

Sometimes after a compliment about my characterization skills, I'm asked if I model my characters on real people. Emphatically, no. And sort of, yes.

To imagine yourself inside another person... is what a storywriter does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose.

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

I love creating new characters that are whatever they are.