Louis Auchincloss Quotes

Some of my characters are a mixture of various aspects of people I have met. others are pure invention.

Writers are magpies, and we collect details about people and we use them for fictional characters.

Most characters are composed of snippets here and there of people I've known, and all rolled into the character I've created. They do become like their own people.

My characters are usually composites. I wish I could pretend that I make up all of these characters, but no. I steal from people. But people will say to me, "Oh, that's me!" and I'm thinking, no, that's not you!

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

Any author of fiction will tell you that characters don't need to be told what to do.

Sometimes after a compliment about my characterization skills, I'm asked if I model my characters on real people. Emphatically, no. And sort of, yes.

I don't have a clear biography of my own that I could recount in an interesting way. I'm made up of the characters that I pulled out of my head, that I invented.

I wrote a story about a character who looks like Harry Styles. But it has nothing to do with Harry Styles at all.

All a writer's characters are imaginary, no matter whether they are based on real people or not. They are people as one imagines them to be.

This is one of the ways fiction is more liberating than nonfiction - I don't have to be so concerned with fact. I had the paradigm of certain people in my head who became my characters, but I never considered these people to be from a "certain sector of society," unless we agree that we're all from certain sectors of society.

When you start writing the magic comes when the characters seem to take on a life of their own and write the words for themselves.

That's been my main interest for the last 15 years, is to really make sure the story and the characters take precedence over everything else, and that I give them everything I can to make them exist as actual people.

If some people read my fiction and see it as fundamentally about philosophical ideas, what it probably means is that these are pieces where the characters are not as alive and interesting as I meant them to be.

There are two kinds of characters in all fiction, the born and the synthetic. If the writer has to ask himself questions - is he tall, is he short? - he had better quit.

Writers spend too much time among dead things. I thought that was profound and actually true, that you're trying to pump life into something that is inanimate. You see what a sort of audacious thing it is to move these sort of imaginary people around in a very stylized and patterned world.

I don't think about the stories so much, as the characters themselves. They live on, and they are almost as real as I am.

I never base characters on real people - you can get into so much trouble that way!

I very much write from characters. Those people start speaking, and then I have them in the house with me and I live with them. Then at some point, it's time to get them out of the house. You can only live with someone like Dr. Georgeous Teitelbaum from THE SISTERS ROSENSWEIG for so long, and then it's time for her to go. But it is very like having the company of these people and trying to craft them in some way into a story.

Books can change your life. Some of the most influential people in our lives are characters we meet in books.

Writing stories, adopting other characters, making up fantastic stories and tales, this is a way of perhaps enhancing who I am. Writing stories takes a commonplace old life and makes it all somehow more interesting. And hopefully I can do that in a way that touches a lot of people in their lives, too.

Being an author means, almost by definition, that you make up characters and then complicate their lives. That's it, really. You make up characters and give them problem after problem after problem.

I try to outline. I'm a lazy outliner. I will put the points down of each chapter or series of chapters, but it always changes. For me it's a place of evolution. I don't really know who the characters are. I don't really know what the story is. I outline and that really just gets me moving. It's like I'm drawing up fake maps, but they turn out to be correct.

I find the characters in my head and the more I write about them, the better I get to know them.

Yes, I am one of those people who feels that most of my work is adaptation of one sort or another. For me, it's a way to jump-start the engine. For example, some people use the technique of basing a character on a friend. They start writing with his or her voice, then at a certain point, the character takes off on his or her own. It probably no longer resembles the model, but it helped the author to get going. I find that's true of form, too. For every play I've written, I know what play I was trying to imitate. That helps me get going.