Jeff Nichols Quotes

My characters surprise me constantly. My characters are like my friends - I can give them advice, but they don't have to take it. If your characters are real, then they surprise you, just like real people.

Unlike life, you've got more or less complete control over what's going on in your stories. That's not to say you can make characters do whatever you want them to - they usually have a life of their own if you've done your job properly.

As an author you hope your characters have sparks but truly in the end they have minds of their own!

Because characters are your creations, you are the one who ultimately gets to decide their fate.

Never argue with your characters; they know themselves better than you do.

I don't like having characters as props. I never want a character to be a prop.

In a way, the characters often do take over.

Any author of fiction will tell you that characters don't need to be told what to do.

The characters do have a life of their own; it's weird.

I'd like to think I'm not quite so pretentious as to think my characters go off and live their lives once I've written the final page and switched the computer off.

Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don't tell them.

If I'm practicing making up what the characters will do, it's never good. In fact, when I catch myself doing that, I try to get rid of that section, and try and let them start making the decisions.

The people I write are real to me, and basically, they tell me about their environments on a need-to-know basis.

You can really help support a character if you understand the setting. So for that reason I generally write about Philadelphia.

The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him.

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.

An author's characters do what he wants them to do.

Actually, I get a little say in what my character would or wouldn't do.

When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him.

The characters are always the focal point of a book for me, whether I'm writing or reading. I may enjoy a book that has an intriguing mystery or a good plot, but to become one of my real favorites, it has to have great characters.

I seem to have to make my characters family before I can access their hearts in any way that matters.

'Longmire' is more of a show about the characters, and you couldn't pay a bigger compliment than to want to know more about my character, or the characters on the show.

I spend a lot of time with my characters.

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

I can tell you that as a writer and as a reader, I regard character as king. Or queen. No matter how riveting the action or interesting the plot twists, if I don't feel like I'm meeting someone who feels real, I'm not going to be compelled to read further.