Nicholas Sparks Quotes

The bad novelist constructs his characters; he directs them and makes them speak. The true novelist listens to them and watches them act; he hears their voices even before he knows them.

I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people.

I like to think that I am telling a story rather than writing it.

When I work on a novel, I usually have one character and a setting in mind.

Characters are the key to a good book. It took me several novels to comprehend that.

I never plot out my novels in terms of the tone of the book. Hopefully, once a story is begun it reveals itself.

Character is character and voice is voice, which translates nicely from writing novels to writing TV. But the process is different. You have a writer's room, people pitch you jokes and you collaborate.

One of the things that happens in novels it's almost like a continual debate with yourself. That's why you're writing the book. It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.

There is a part of me in every character, naturally. That's why novelists rarely write good autobiographies. You start one and it becomes another novel.

Many of my characters first came through to me as voices. That's why I use a tape recorder.

Writing a novel was like I had some Play-Doh to work with and could just keep working with it - doing a million drafts and things changing radically and characters appearing and disappearing and solving mysteries: Why is this thing here? Should I just take that away? And then realizing, no, that is there, in fact, because that is the key to this. I love that sort of detective work, keeping the faith alive until all the questions have been sleuthed out.

My own feeling is that the only possible reason for engaging in the hard labor of writing a novel, is that one is bothered by something one needs to understand, and can come to understand only through the characters in the imagined situation.

My characters all start with rhythms and sounds. Once I hear the voice and get into the rhythm, the attitude and the physicality just come out on their own.

It's dialogue that gives your cast their voices, and is crucial in defining their characters.

I did 40 voices for Chris Wedge, the director of the first film, before coming up with the version we used. He was hard to please, I don't know why. I gave him really slow talking voices. then I thought perhaps Sid could be an Indian sounding sloth. To find out more about my character, I watched footage of sloths. I discovered that the food they store in their pouches rots and ferments and half the time they're drunk.

Before I begin a novel I have a strong sense of at least one central character and how the story begins, and a more vague sense of where things may wind up, but at some point, if the novel is any good at all, the story and characters take on lives of their own and take over the book, and the writer has to be open to that.

In terms of style, I think the memoirist should have a novelist's skill and all the elements of a novelist's toolbox. When I read a memoir, I want to really, deeply experience what the author experienced. I want to see the characters and hear the way they speak and understand how they think. And so in that way, writing a memoir feels similar to writing a novel.

The character of Brent Spiner. We certainly collaborate on the concept of that, but he basically writes the script, then it's sort of a combination of his voice and my voice.

I think you can't go into any story-breaking process thinking, 'What if they come off as unlikeable?' You just gotta break the story because if you know who your character is, the story will tell you. The story will dictate and say, "This feels off-kilter for this particular person."

Sometimes when a character in a novel is difficult for me to enter, I sue something in myself or in my own life as a doorway into that character's mind and emotions.

But I have seen my obstacles: trivialities, learning and poetry. This last needs explaining: the old artist's readiness to dissolve characters into a haze. Characters cannot come alive and fight and guide the world unless the novelist wants them to remain characters.

I look at a pilot and go, "I see the landscape. I see the characters. I see the direction and the potential of the story." And I also go, "That didn't work. I could change that. Maybe that works. I don't know. We'll see." For me, I look at it, as an actor, as what can I improve upon? So, to have it out there and judged solely on its own merit is really a unique experience for me.

My publisher feels that my readers are loyal to the voice of my stories, the characters I'm creating.

I have a scenario but almost always it's entwined with at least one person to begin with. Then I sort of expand from there and I'm thinking about books novels. I've got these scrolls of paper that I hang up in my office and this is my idea room, my nightmare factory, and I have a big title at the top of the scroll and on the left hand side I have these character sketches on the characters, and then once I figure out who they are I can figure out what they want and once I figure out what they want I'm able to put obstacles in the way of that desire, and that's where plot springs from.

Yeah, and the language the "we" has, and the character the "we" has. Because that was the part of the book that I didn't plan out, but the part that I was most curious about as I was writing. You know what you're doing, but you're sometimes still sort of curious as you're writing it.