Sam Heughan Quotes

I always like when things are loosely based on real events. That always makes it more interesting because there's a lot of research you can do.

Sometimes I'm asked if I do research for my stories. The answer is yes and no. No, in the sense that I seldom plow through books at the library to gather material. Yes, in the sense that the first fifteen years of my life turned out to be one big research project.

Sometimes, I get ideas from dreams. Often, my stories are based on adventures that I, or my friends, have actually lived.

Most of my stories have some basis in fact.

I can't read historical fiction because I find the real thing so much more interesting.

I always tell people, I never get writer's block because it's coming straight from my brain, like, real-life experiences. I'm like the news. I'm just reporting it for myself.

Even the two novels I've written were based on true stories. It's how I'm wired - real life is fascinating and fantastical enough. The kind of journalism I did unpeeled lids from cans otherwise sealed.

So much of what I write in fiction is based on true stories.

I think I'm too lazy a writer to do something like historical fiction. You have to do so much research. I just write what I know.

My books are written from personal experience, from memories, and from stories that come to me from all places.

Obviously any fiction is going to be a combination of what is invented, what is overheard, what is experienced, what is experienced by people close to you, what you are told, what you have read, all mixed together into this kind of soup which, like any good soup, at the end you cannot really distinguish the ingredients.

I often tell people who want to write historical fiction: don't read all that much about the period you're writing about; read things from the period that you're writing about. There's a tendency to stoke up on a lot of biography and a lot of history, and not to actually get back to the original sources.

I've always been a history buff. It was one of the few subjects at school that really, really caught me. I think you'll find a lot of actors will be interested in history because it sparks your imagination so much. When you enter a period of history, your imagination just goes wild in creating the world, which is really what acting is.

I like to do the research of history and the creativity of writing fiction. I am creating this thing which I think is twice as difficult as writing either history or fiction.

Stories come to me and I don't know where they come from, but afterwards I can look back and say, 'Oh yes, that's got a little bit of me, or a little bit of my own son in it'. That's where ideas come from.

Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.

The entirety of 'Bellocq's Ophelia' was a project, and I was interested in doing research and looking at photographs and writing about them, imagining this woman Ophelia and what her life was like and the kinds of things she thought about.

The character of Rosie is based on a woman who used to live in the same apartment building I lived in many years ago. She's taken on a life of her own, of course.

I don't separate my books into historical novels and the rest. To me, they're all made-up worlds, and both kinds are borne out of curiosity, some investigation into the past.

I've done a number of things based on real people or true stories or based on books, and I'm a great believer that you have to be true to the script.

The question I am most often asked is how do I find my ideas? The answer is I don't. Ideas find me. A character in history will suddenly step right out of the past and demand a book. Generally, people don't bother to speak to me unless there's a good chance that I'll take them on.

I did no research on 'The Best Man.' That was something that came out from my own head.

I find my characters and stories in many varied places; sometimes they pop out of newspaper articles, obscure historical texts, lively dinner party conversations and some even crawl out of the dusty remote recesses of my imagination.

I have been blessed in many ways, and one of those is to have been born in Africa, for me a great treasure house of stories. I have been researching it since my infancy; reading about it, talking to men and women who have spent their lives in this land, living it as I have and loving it as I do. I write almost entirely from my own experience.

I always draw from things around me that people around me have gone through... The story that could be taken really literally is not from my life exactly. But bits and pieces are, and the sentiment behind it is.