S. E. Hinton Quotes

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

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.

I'll often dream about characters before I start writing their stories.

I create fictional narratives, but it's based on literal people.

I think the idea of creating a character from scratch, one that has not been done in a novel or an existing story, is immensely exciting, terrifying and ultimately rewarding.

What do you do in a novel? You take recognizable characters from your own life, and you fantasize about what they're really like.

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

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

I take stuff from real life and try to make a character out of it. And I try to live the world of the characters a little bit.

Characters are not created on paper or laptop alone.

I wrote a story about a character who looks like Harry Styles. But it has nothing to do with Harry Styles at all.

The formula for creative writing in high school or college is write what you know. And I said they don't know nothing. Imagine something. Do you know what it's like to be a Madame in Paris, when you're too old to have any clients. No, you don't. I don't either. Write about it.

When you write, you hear the characters speaking to you as you take dictation from what they say. And obviously, they had particular personalities when you hear them.

The characters in my stories, whether historical or fictional, usually prove to be a compilation of influences taken from differing sources, but never drawn from one model.

I normally write in the first person, and my narrators are as real to me as any of the people I have worked with. They live and breathe in my imagination.

In fiction, you have a rough idea what's coming up next - sometimes you even make a little outline - but in fact you don't know. Each day is a whole new - and for me, a very invigorating - experience.

As a writer, I always think about who my prototype actors are, in my brain. It's helpful, as a writer, to think about that.

I don't really set out to explore grand themes. I set out to tell a story. And one I have to be able to imagine right through.

I've never been comfortable with the idea of using family and friends in stories. Which is why it takes me longer than something else. Because you make them up out of nothing. Doing that is harder.

A work of fiction is conceived very much the same way as a dream occurs in the mind of a sleeper. But a lot of it is imagination. It's not based on real people.

The lovely thing about writing is, well, two things. One, writing fiction allows us to bring an order to our lives that doesn't exist in real life. And two, it allows us to create human characters that we know better than we will ever know anyone in real life.

As a novelist, I tend to know significantly more about my characters than I do about my friends.

The characters in my stories all have quite loud lives in my head. It's a relief to get them on the page. Often they come from people I've noticed or overheard - but that is only a part of them. It's only by writing that I discover who these people really are.

I take in a lot of stuff from real life, movies, television, news and it all gets mixed in my head and somehow turns into a story idea.

Most good fiction also has a character the writer seems to know more deeply than anyone can actually be known in life, but a few unusual writers can make something great without that.