Jello Biafra Quotes

If I write a character, instead of looking from the outside, like maybe a journalist would, trying to describe them physically and figuring out what kind of things they might be interested in or have in their house, I don't really do it that way. I try to feel what it would be like to be inside this person, to be them.

Don't write about a character. Become that character, and then write your story.

There's a kind of acting that goes on in my head when I'm writing a character where I put myself in their place.

What I try to do in writing any character is to put myself in his position.

As a writer, it is always fun to imagine yourself in someone else's shoes.

If you read literature, you put yourself in somebody else's shoes. You learn from great figures in literature.

Sometimes you can just step into the character, and you get all your feelings and emotions just from sympathizing with her and being her. But then, other times, you just have to resort back to anything that you've been through in your own life and try to play that.

I don't have to live the lives of my characters to write about them. It's about really putting yourself in their shoes.

There are technical tricks that may help you create more effective characters. My approach to characterization is not at all technical. I can't really analyze how I do it, but I am sure of one thing. To write convincing characters, you must possess the ability to think yourself into someone else's skin.

The trick to writing for people is, you have to be able to turn them on in your head. And know how they'd word something or how they'd inflect it.

Part of being a fiction writer is being able to imagine how someone else is thinking and feeling. I think I've always been good at that.

To imagine yourself inside another person... is what a storywriter does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose.

You've got to empathize with every character you play.

It helps to write as the character that I am trying to be, and try to journal every day as them. Once I've already recorded thoughts as this person, it's easier to just flip back through and be like, 'Oh, yeah, this is what she's thinking; this is what she's feeling.'

As I write, I try to be the character.

I don't want to draw from my own experiences in life. I first like to become the character and then think from her point of view.

As actors, we have to take characters, and we have to feel for them and ultimately become them, and share that on screen so that audience feels that.

You can't write good characters if you can't imagine what it's like being in another person's skin. And if you can imagine that, you naturally want other people's lives to be better. You want to make that happen.

I don't judge my characters, and that's my job not to judge them. It's my job to treat them with respect and to just look at it from their point of view.

The joy of writing drama is putting yourself into different people's heads.

A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins.

What I do in the writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself. It is the act of a writer's imagination that I set the most high.

By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that person knows himself or herself. You're sort of a predator, an invader of people.

Writing fiction is a good way to inhabit other minds, if not other lives.

To try and imagine that I'm another person is always going to be hard - whether I'm writing about a truck driver or someone who is gay, who's trans, who is of a different ethnicity or creed. But it would be boring if I always had to write about myself and my limited viewpoint.