Peter Carey Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

My characters are fictional. I get ideas from real people, sometimes, but my characters always exist only in my head.

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

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

I'm not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view.

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 hate the analyzing thing. People say, 'Why do you think your character did that? I don't know. I'm not an analyst, and they're not in psychotherapy. Unless it's a film where they're in therapy.

Characters are an extension of your imagination.

I'm always excited about stories that allow me to explore a character and create interesting stories and worlds that we haven't seen before.

Rarely do I try to pull a creature out of life and make it a character.

There's a huge distance between who I am as a regular person and what takes place in my fiction.

As writers, we are sketching people all the time when we write fiction.

I take little bits and pieces of ideas that I may or may not believe in but I give them to this character and he runs with them. I have fun with however he handles the situation.

It's usually easier for me to begin writing in a character's voice if that person is different from me in some significant way.

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.

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

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

You can't take a character anywhere they don't expect the character to go. But within those confines is where creativity lies.

I suppose it's possible that a writer would have feeling for his characters, but I can't see how, because writing is such a meticulous, intricate, technical business. I wish I could say that I love my characters and that frequently they take over the book and run away with the plot and so on. But they don't exist.

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.

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

I like to make definite choices and give my characters as many unique edges as possible.