Julie Walters Quotes

The most important basis of any novel is wanting to be someone else, and this means creating a character.

A character wandering around asking, 'Who am I?' isn't, in and of itself, a story I'm interested in telling.

It wasn't a leap for me to go from not wanting to be in my body as a teenager, not wanting to be in my house, to thinking, 'What would happen if I had disappeared?' And then going from writing scenes of angry kids to thinking a little more about the parents and what their lives would be like.

Let me say that the path I did take for a brief period of my life was not of reckless drug use, hurting others, but it was a path of quiet rebellion, of a little experimentation of a darker side of my confusion in a confusing world, lost in the midst of finding my identity.

Writing a novel is an incredibly free experience. One puts one's self in a narrative mode. You can go off in any direction - the past, the future, or go laterally, or include one's own beliefs. It's total freedom.

I came to New York, and it was fascinating and intimidating and yielding, and all the stuff it's supposed to be. But whatever the abstract essence I was seeking, I couldn't find exactly that.

All of my problems are rather complicated - I need an entire novel to deal with them, not a short story or a movie. It's like a personal therapy.

Sometimes I feel the only way I can get a major publisher interested in mental illness is if I find a character who has bipolar disorder and is also a love-sick vampire attending an English school called Hogwarts. But I'm not giving up.

I think a novel has to be about where you are at a given moment in time. I think it really needs to represent some specific pain you're going through. it's not just a story.

My characters tend to be more dynamic because they're reaching that point in their lives where their old way of being is breaking down. They're conflicted by the idea that they don't know what's next. You could call it Kierkegaard's leap of faith, when you get tired of sort of reinventing yourself on a very superficial level.

I kind of see myself as a cartoon that's on its way to becoming a real person that has to find that special amulet or mushroom to get to that next realm or level. I don't feel like anything is that tangible. It freaks me out, why I feel unhappy or conflicted and why that can change on a dime.

A novel is like a gland pill - it nips off the cream of my hysterics and gets them running on track in a book where they belong instead of rioting all over my person.

I don't think I found my voice until I reached New York. I suppose it's possible I would have had some kind of different literary career if I had not discovered New York.

I had begun to write novels because of a fierce, self-serving impulse in my own heart. I had not considered the potential in a book for felt communion, the bright largesse of intimately participating in the lives of other people.

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.

I try to write about a woman finding her self-respect, valuing herself, and liking herself again. But what one desperately wants now is to write a proper novel.

I did a show called 'Wonderland' a few years back, and I was fortunate enough to spend a full-on two weeks - I'm talking 13-15 hours a day - with the doctors and patients at Bellevue in New York. That served me well for 'Durham County.'

I've suffered from an identity crisis my entire life. It's why I went into acting.

Writing a novel is an act of self-annihilation as much as self-discovery. You can kill whole appetites and flood whole depths while plumbing them, but if you are serious about it you also get to put something into the world that wasn't quite there before.

Probably the best thing that happened to me was going nuts. Nobody knew who I was until that happened.

A novel is a great act of passion and intellect, carpentry and largess. From the very beginning, I wrote to explain my own life to myself, and I invited readers who chose to make the journey with me to join me on the high wire.

Each of my novels features a protagonist undertaking a difficult personal journey. On the way, each of these characters - mostly female - discovers something about herself and at the same time makes an impact on other people's lives.

I've always enjoyed the teen angst thing. I had a lot of teen angst as I was growing up, so I think I have a lot to say about it through characters before I have to move on.

My first novel, 'Man Walks Into a Room,' is about a man who's lost his memory and has to start a second life. On one level, it's about how we create a coherent sense of self.

Actors tell stories and we play different characters, and not all of them are healthy.