Dana Carvey Quotes

A book begins with an image or character or situation that I care about deeply.

Once I started to value and respect my characters, I could really hear them. I just let them start talking.

As a storyteller, when you see somebody who is the character you envisioned, you feel this energy in the room.

You hear many things, take a little from each experience, and tune your imagination to create believable characters and situations.

The easier you make it look, the more difficult it is. Creating characters out of nothing, and making them interesting - and that's another advice I would give to writers.

Sometimes you have to search for inspiration with characters, and other times, they just drop out of the sky and arrive.

I find it inspiring and I always think when I'm working on something new, whether it's a new kind of character or a new kind of story or new kind of camera, it gets my creative wheels spinning.

They [my characters]speak to me all the time! In fact some of them never shut up!

You basically go in animation and it's all in the imagination. There aren't even pictures to look at. You usually go in there and work with whoever the director is to create this voice and this character.

I've been inspired by dreams - I've even stolen scenes or images or characters from them.

I think at some level, it's just alchemy that we, as writers, can't explain when we write the characters. I don't set out to create the characters - they're not, to me, collections of quirks that I can put together. I discover the characters, instead. I usually go through a standard set of interview questions with the character in the beginning and ask the vital stuff: What's important to you? What do you love? Hate? Fear? .. and then I know where to start. But the characters just grow on their own, at a certain point. And start surprising me.

Though I am never exactly "blocked" I do have difficult periods. I am led by a fascination with material - the challenge of presenting it in an original and engaging way. I have no problem imagining stories, characters, distinctive settings & themes - but the difficulty is choosing a voice & a language in which to present it.

I've been acting my whole life. I have this huge imagination! I'm a dancer and my mom's a dance teacher, and I was always performing and entertaining people. I'd go to see live theatre or a movie, and I'd become the main character for a few days afterwards. I loved being somebody new for a temporary amount of time.

In some sense, prose fiction is just a way of unlocking a space. If I can unlock the space, it comes out and it's vivid, I find that I care about it, and it's part of me.

Sometimes I hear a voice - sometimes it's the voice of someone I know. And sometimes that leads to a character, which leads to a story.

What I look for in any character, good or bad, is whether I can hear him speak. If I can imagine him that clearly, then I can write about him.

Every so often when I'm writing, a character might actually be a distinct person in my head - often not an actor or a face, literally a person who just seems to exist in my imagination. Then the challenge is finding somebody who is close enough to that to make me feel like I've ended up where I wanted to be.

I put a lot of myself into my characters when I write.

I do this a lot with names. I'll start with a name, and then for some reason he won't talk much, or he's older than I pictured him just because of a name I give him. So then I finally get the right name, and I can't shut the guy up. This always happens. There's always a character who gives me trouble that way.

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

Some authors, when starting a novel, imagine a place first. Others, a character starts taking shape in their head. I start with a hook, a situation, a 'what if.'

To me, my characters are more real than most people I meet.

Music actually inspires me a lot. I listen to a lot of music, and often I find that if I can associate mentally a song or a piece of music with a particular character or scene, it helps me get back into the head of that character.

Normally, I name my characters after famous comedians.

As a writer of fiction, I spend my days inventing real lives for make-believe people; what I create can only seem real.