Lulu Wang Quotes

I don't believe you just create a character out of thin air, there's always something of yourself you bring.

I'm not really an autobiographical writer, though I use lots of stuff from my life to make my stories seem real. But when I actually write about myself, I get very confused.

There are bits of me in all my characters.

Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.

I can write with authority only about what I know well, which means that I end up using surface details of my own life in my fiction.

Because I write fiction, I don't write autobiography, and to me they are very different things. The first-person narrative is a very intimate thing, but you are not addressing other people as 'I' - you are inhabiting that 'I.'

I don't really base any of my characters on specific people that I know, although my characters are informed by the kind of people who live in my community.

I don't write autobiographically.

I often draw from people in my own experience to base a character on, going back to my days with Mike Leigh.

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?

Sometimes a character is really based on research that you do. Other times it's just based on your imagination or perhaps your conversation with the director. Or sometimes all of the above. It depends on the movie and character.

It's the only way I really know how to tell the story is to be able to kind of live through the characters. So when I find something that resonates with me, it's usually because it cuts to something very real inside of me; something that I've gone through or experienced.

Like most writers, I write about what has happened to me as that involves the minimum amount of research.

In a sense, any story that anyone writes is going to be autobiographical - whether it deals directly with the author's experience or not - because it captures what we're obsessed with while working on that particular piece.

It's really a misconception to identify the writer with the main character, given that the author creates all the characters in the book. In certain ways, I'm every character.

I always find stuff in my characters to relate to.

All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely different medium.

I'll write about myself, or people I know, or archetypal characters, but the goal is to get at some truth, not to necessarily convey my own experience as an individual to the world.

I think it's nearly impossible to write something fictional without having it be about yourself in some way or another.

Creating characters is like throwing together ingredients for a recipe. I take characteristics I like and dislike in real people I know, or know of, and use them to embellish and define characters.

I don't base any character on a real person, and really don't do composites either. I make them up.

Very few of my characters are based on people I've known. It is too constricting.

People are always thinking that I'm the main character in my books, but each one has been different, and sometimes they've been men.

I love making characters real and believable, through my own experience and choices.

I put a lot of myself into my characters when I write.