Julia Quinn Quotes

Before I write the first page of a novel, I spend a long time creating detailed backgrounds for my characters. I imagine the experiences that have formed them, what makes them happy, angry, fearful, and what they yearn for.

I believe that if the story is fleshed out and the characters more believable, the reader is more likely to take the journey with them. In addition, the plot can be more complex. My characters are very real to me, and I want each of my characters to be different.

In a way, we tried to make 'The Salvation' a contemporary film with contemporary emotions. At the same time, in the script, you get a feel that all the small talk is not a part of our universe. It's more precise talk.

One of the things I enjoy most about writing historical romance is researching inspiring backgrounds and settings.

When you're playing a real person, there's a balance between playing the person in the script and playing the person as he was in life. You have to be respectful and true to who that person was, but at the same time tell the story in the film.

To make a book convincing, it's less important that the right tree be in the right place than that the characters are emotionally real.

I love to have real people of history interact with my fictional characters. History gives me the plot. I research the period meticulously, and then I blend in a romantic and sensual love story to give it balance. The heavier the history, the more romantic the couple must be.

Going back to my own past as a reader, I was a big, big reader of romances, particularly as a teenager, the age that my books are aimed at.

One believes in Stephen Dedalus as one believes in few characters in fiction.

I'm trying to get at something a little transcendent between humans. But at the same time, there's all that baggage: What's beautiful about humans is what's balanced by what's kind of ugly and petty and depressing.

Other genres are plot-driven, but the entire focus of a romance novel is on the characters and their arcs.

I've always just admired women who were able to navigate through dramatic and comedic waters and sort of do it all.

I did a co-authored book not so long ago that was an American historical romance set at the turn of the century. I'm fascinated by that period in time and would love to do more.

My wheelhouse is intense characters who have a certain sympathetic streak and also a sense of humor.

I knew what kind of actor I was going to be, and I looked for inspiration to people like Alec Guinness, Cyril Cusack, Timothy Spall and Jim Broadbent. I looked at them and thought, 'They play human beings as they really are.'

Luckily, on 'Kyle XY,' I had great training in being tough and vulnerable at the same time.

It's very true that you can be both selfless and selfish at the same time. What we tend towards, particularly in filmmaking, is this binary sort of, 'This is a good guy, this is a bad guy.' And I quite like the fact that life is a bit more complex than that.

It seems like the darker the books are, the nicer the person is. People say it's the romance writers you've got to watch out for.

I have always been attracted to good scripts and try hard to make characters as believable as possible. That means trying to figure out how they would react to situations, what they eat, think, and feel.

In a film we have limited time and space to say what we have to, hence the visual language and brevity needs to be paramount. In a novel, however, we can dissect each thought and emotion and build on it.

In 'Fugly,' I play a very middle-class guy with whom anyone can relate. At the same time, playing such characters is not as easy as it sounds.

Sometimes you can publish a first novel in a kind of lyrical flourish, but it is not really a lyrical form. The beautiful truths about the world are more hard won than that. Novels should be bleach boned. It's a question of cumulative observation and lived suffering. It takes time.

Impressionable audiences should be seeing characters that are properly fleshed out.

People are falling in love with characters now, and that is why writers are creating such stories. I am really happy that such stories are getting prominence.

I think we worry way too much about where books should fit inside genres. In a romance, the hero and heroine are on a journey together, and no matter how awful it gets, by the end of the book they'll be in love, with the probability of a happy ending.