Claude Chabrol Quotes

I try not to have actors in mind when I write because the tendency then is to be influenced by either their last performance or your favourite of their performances.

I find it an easy way into writing pieces is to think what the character's voice is like, and start from there.

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

I think all characters are facets of the writer. In a way, they have to be if you're going to write them convincingly.

I'm never writing as a character.

When you write for a show that's not yours, your job is to hear the voices of the characters and write as best you can for those voices.

Your source material is the people you know, not those you don't know, but every character is an extension of the author's own personality.

In my early writing, all of my characters were exactly the same person. They all spoke the same, made the same types of jokes, reacted the same, etc. I think they were all just me in disguise.

The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.

My characters are fictional. I get ideas from real people, sometimes, but my characters always exist only in my head.

When I'm writing, I try to have the mask of my character on as I'm walking through the world.

I think the idea of creating a character from scratch, one that has not been done in a novel or an existing story, is immensely exciting, terrifying and ultimately rewarding.

As a writer, I always think about who my prototype actors are, in my brain. It's helpful, as a writer, to think about that.

I have the power to write these books where I invent characters that I really like, and it gets to come out the way they want it to come out, and I get to make it happen.

I don't want to be a writer where all the characters sound the same. There's a facility in that kind of writing.

I tend to write one character at a time. But I don't write the entirety of one character at a time.

When I'm writing, I'm writing for a particular actor. When a lot of writers are writing, they're writing an idea. So they're not really writing in a specific voice.

I do a lot of improvising when I'm writing, and I work very hard on the scripts... they are written very much in an actor-friendly way.

When I write a book, characters come to life for me somewhere at the back of my head. I strive to make them flesh and blood in an abstract way, in words.

I write about characters that interest me. And I don't think of my books as being forms of entertainment.

Usually, when I write a novel, it takes me about 100 pages to figure out the voice of the narrator.

Early on in the writing, there is often a sentence that pins down a character for me.

I need a distance to my characters when I write.

The only successful way to write, and the only one I have found, is to be the character. Give up on trying to control them. Writers always talk about hearing voices. That's what they mean.

As I write, I try to be the character.