John Banville Quotes

It is a wonderful thing in the process of writing when such paper characters are first sketched, and, when one is doing good work, from a certain point in time they come alive and start contradicting the author as well.

I love all the characters I write.

Writers often say that characters begin to write themselves, and I never used to believe that. I always thought that was complete hogwash.

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.

The great thing about writing is that you always put yourself in the shoes of the character. If you're doing it right, you can see into the heart of all your characters. Usually, when there's a writing problem, it's because you aren't doing that.

When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him.

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.

I'd like to think I'm not quite so pretentious as to think my characters go off and live their lives once I've written the final page and switched the computer off.

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 like to write characters that feel like people that I would know.

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

As an author you hope your characters have sparks but truly in the end they have minds of their own!

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?

If there is any secret to my success, I think it's that my characters are very real to me. I feel everything they feel, and therefore I think my readers care about them.

I always believed in my characters. I lived them.

When you write, you hear the characters speaking to you as you take dictation from what they say. And obviously, they had particular personalities when you hear them.

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 treat all my characters as if they were real, and I am scrupulous about the details of their lives.

Never argue with your characters; they know themselves better than you do.

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.

When you create a show, and create characters, these people are like children to you.

What I look for in any character, good or bad, is whether I can hear him speak. If I can imagine him that clearly, then I can write about him.

I have the power to write these books where I invent characters that I really like, and it gets to come out the way they want it to come out, and I get to make it happen.