Michael Scott Quotes

All a writer's characters are imaginary, no matter whether they are based on real people or not. They are people as one imagines them to be.

What I do is to collaborate with each actor and work one-on-one to create a character. And that is a matter of huge complexity and is a combination of a great deal of discussion and a lot of practical work. It involves a lot of consideration for the real people out there, and all kinds of sources of real people. The result is the character. But I'm not supposed to talk about what it is we do, because it's nobody's business.

The movies I make tend not to be quite reality but the characters are inspired by real people and they're always very personal.

Writers are magpies, and we collect details about people and we use them for fictional characters.

Most characters are composed of snippets here and there of people I've known, and all rolled into the character I've created. They do become like their own people.

My characters are usually composites. I wish I could pretend that I make up all of these characters, but no. I steal from people. But people will say to me, "Oh, that's me!" and I'm thinking, no, that's not you!

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

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.

That's been my main interest for the last 15 years, is to really make sure the story and the characters take precedence over everything else, and that I give them everything I can to make them exist as actual people.

Few real people appear in my two novels, actually. "Ari" appears on the edge of this book a couple of times - but on the edge, she's never in it, even if she's a determining force from the outside. Everybody in the first book was basically made up, if never from scratch.

There are two kinds of characters in all fiction, the born and the synthetic. If the writer has to ask himself questions - is he tall, is he short? - he had better quit.

I write about relationships and I try to create real-life characters.

Some of my characters are a mixture of various aspects of people I have met. others are pure invention.

I sometimes use some personality traits to fashion part of a character. Most of my characters are composites of either people I know or people in the public eye.

I have no idea and I think Steven King strongest suit is the characters that he does create, all in the same area where he lives. The way he describes them is one of his fortes and it boggles my mind how he's able to do that and to create so many. It must be thousands by now.

I think because I write so many short stories, it's not that hard to come up with characters that are not me.

It was fun to create characters who had truth to them but were also made up so as not to completely offend!

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.

I love it when characters surprise you, just like real people. When I write a scene I just try to make the characters behave in a way that feels natural to them. Sometimes that means they make a left turn and do something unexpected. Those are always the best scenes in my opinion.

Mike Leigh encourages you to choose a person that you know to base your character on. You write a whole list of people that you know and you go through that list in great depth with him. And then he chooses one of those people from your list.

What's the difference between Hollywood characters and my characters? Mine are real.

Creating characters is like throwing together ingredients for a recipe. I take characteristics I like and dislike in real people I know, or know of, and use them to embellish and define characters.

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.

I always talk about my characters like they're real people.