Nell Freudenberger Quotes

All the great writers root their characters in true human behaviour.

My first job is to write the characters as full and authentic people as well as I can.

It's hard to know whether certain characters come to life or not, they either come to have their own life or they don't. I've written many things in which the characters just remain inert.

I love making characters real and believable, through my own experience and choices.

One of the things about writing fiction is that you create people that you feel, more or less, as though you know.

I always talk about my characters like they're real people.

Whether writing fiction or nonfiction, I've never had the sense I was 'making up' a character. It feels more like watching people reveal themselves, ever more deeply, more intimately.

Novelists embody plural selves all the time. What are characters, after all, if not other selves?

When you're writing fiction, you're in every character 'cause you can't help it.

The interesting thing about fiction from a writer's standpoint is that the characters come to life within you. And yet who are they and where are they? They seem to have as much or more vitality and complexity as the people around you.

To me, characters are at the heart of great literature.

I love... What's gratifying to me is when you make/create a character and a human being, a person who lives entirely and who has their own existence, just merely from the words on a page.

The writer of stories or of novels settles on men and imitates them; he exhausts the possibilities of his characters.

And I have the support of the writers: I have a great relationship with the creative team, and they have a good hold of my character and my personality, and they come up with some great stuff, and I'm forever trying to change it up, keep it fresh.

I always say I write my own novels and the characters don't take control of me, but in fact, I look at the characters in the early stages and I think, 'What is he or she like,' and they slowly come together and they become the person they are.

I treat all my characters as if they were real, and I am scrupulous about the details of their lives.

It is a wonderful thing in the process of writing when such paper characters are first sketched, and, when one is doing good work, from a certain point in time they come alive and start contradicting the author as well.

One has to be able to twist and change and distort characters, play with them like clay, so everything fits together. Real people don't permit you to do that.

I always try to write about believable people.

All characters come from people I know, but after the initial inspiration, I tend to modify the characters so they fit with the story.

I have tried very hard as a novelist to say, 'Novels are about individuals and especially larger than life individuals.'

I love to evoke the bones and meat and thoughts of characters.

It's very hard to connect with a character when you haven't gotten a sense of who they are.

Characters are an extension of your imagination.

Characters are not created on paper or laptop alone.