Elizabeth Strout Quotes

I think there's always pieces of yourself that bleed into your character. That's inevitable.

In all my characters, I try to find an iota of myself, and in Castle, I found a lot. He gets away with a lot, so that's fun.

If you write something that's personal, there's going to be elements of yourself in it.

The character I play is a wonderful compilation of things I hate about myself and things I love about myself and things that I've invented to make her even more interesting than me.

In each of my characters there is a little of me. Not strictly autobiographical but a little piece of my soul.

Every writer, to some extent, writes about himself.

I think if a character appeals to you, there are certain parts of yourself will come to the fore and other parts that will play down.

For the most part, there's so much of me in my characters.

I've done teaching and things like that because if you're acting, you're becoming other human beings, and you need to have time to find who you are as well.

At first, I didn't realize it was gonna be a character. I just thought I was gonna be doing me.

I feel there's something about becoming a character that helps people understand themselves.

Sometimes I think all my pictures are just pictures of me.

The more time you spend with any character, whether it's from a comic book universe or a really naturalistic universe, the more time you spend, the more that character just becomes another aspect of yourself.

When I write, it's like choosing which shoes I'm going to put on. More often than not, my lyrics are personal - but I sometimes have to put myself in other people's shoes.

I'm not really interested in myself in my writing. I can't see myself in the songs, even though I know different parts of me are there.

'I' is the word everyone uses to refer to themselves. On the one hand, it points to a specific person, but it's also this blank space that you can insert yourself into; it's a chute into empathy.

I do not believe that with a fictional character you can force yourself too far away from yourself. There has to be some of you in it.

A self is a frightening thing to waste, it's the lens through which one's whole life is viewed, and few people are willing to part with it, in death, or even imaginatively, in art.

Although human beings are incapable of talking about themselves with total honesty, it is much harder to avoid the truth while pretending to be other people. They often reveal much about themselves in a very straightforward way. I am certain that I did. There is nothing that says more about its creator than the work itself.

I always try to find some part of a character that exists in me and plug that in.

I've always kind of ripped from real life to some degree or at least how I'm feeling in the moment. In fact, maybe that's really it. In anything I've ever written, all the characters sound like me, which I don't think is a bad thing.

I think there are parts of myself in every character I play.

To be a character who feels a deep emotion, one must go into the memory's vault and mix in a sad memory from one's own life.

I do this acting thing mostly for myself. I like to make a connection and communicate with the audience to make myself feel less lonely. I also do it to develop my own character, so sometimes I do it to just be away in a certain area that I've never been to. But mostly, the story has to do something for me.

I want things to be characters and not me. Why would I want to play me?