Jonathan Kellerman Quotes

Novels are . . . an unsurpassed form to understand people.

A man's character never changes radically from youth to old age. What happens is that circumstances bring out characteristics which have not been obvious to the superficial observer.

You can be interested in a Jane Smiley novel whether or not anyone says a word. She enters into her characters' thoughts with great understanding and depth.

I'm interested in writing that explores all sides of human beings.

What makes Shakespeare eternal is his grasp of psychology. He knew how to nail stuff about us as human beings.

You learn stuff from every character you play about the human condition that can be quite enlightening.

I love to study people and pick apart what makes a person or character who they are. I never want to get complacent in that.

I write books because I have always been fascinated by stories and language, and because I love thinking about what makes people tick. Writing a story... 'The Giver' or any other... is simply an exploration of the nature of behavior: why people do what they do, how it affects others, how we change and grow, and what decisions we make along the way.

I think acting has made me very in tune with human behavior and myself as well.

Readers no longer need novelists to tell us what it's like to cross the world on a ship or fight a war. In the twenty-first century, we get that information in other ways. The thing that's still a mystery to us is the human heart. What we want is to understand people, what they're doing, and why they're doing it.

I look to find the heart and soul of people, of my characters. I look for the truth of them and the truths about life that are presented through them.

Hopefully I'm learning a lesson from every new thing I write, whether it features guys in spandex or not.

The novel is a perfect medium for revealing to us the changing rainbow of our living relationships. The novel can help us to live,as nothing else can: no didactic Scripture, anyhow. If the novelist keeps his thumb out of the pan.

With any character, I try to focus more on who the character is and how they got to be who they are.

I'm a novelist at heart. My sole intention is to write the best novel possible. I don't think about the film potential at all.

The thing that inspires me most is reading and just observing the people around me. I think those are the two things that make me want to write.

Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people.

I consider myself foremost a novelist with the intent of crafting stories that people will remember.

I wrote short stories when I was a teenager, but they weren't any good and I kinda knew it.

A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins.

I can't remember the last book that taught me so much, and so well, about what it means to be human.

To write fiction, one needs a whole series of inspirations about people in an actual environment, and then a whole lot of work on the basis of those inspirations.

A novelist is a man who doesn't like his mother.

The novelist is the person who spends a lot of his or her day thinking about the human drama and emotional complexity.

I think there's a real connection between acting and writing novels because the way I write characters has a little bit to do with the method acting that I was taught in high school and college.