Chinua Achebe Quotes

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.

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

A story is how we construct our experiences.

Imagination, it turns out, is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character's actions or lines are truer than others.

I always find stuff in my characters to relate to.

The narrative constructs the identity of the character, what can be called his or her narrative identity, in constructing that of the story told. It is the identity of the story that makes the identity of the character.

You start as an audience member and create a world you're interested in, and then you move into the telling of those stories, bringing what has interested you as an audience member.

What's fascinated me from the time I was a little kid was the way we construct our lives through stories.

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

I'm still really fascinated with characters and people and telling their stories.

But I always need to identify with a character to write about him or her - and by 'identify,' I mean see the world through that person's eyes and have a strong sense of the inner logic of their acts and decisions, wacky or wrongheaded though they might be. In that sense, I think there's some of me in all of them.

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

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

I try not to push characters too close to myself because they get harder to write, but as a writer, you try to find odd little personal experiences that you hope are universal or think might be universal.

Creating is one thing; telling the story is one thing. I see myself more as a storyteller than a story creator.

My number one goal has always been to try to tell interesting, cohesive, long-term stories.

Usually with film writing I start with characters, and set about writing their story.

You can have the greatest characters in the world and write beautifully, but if nothing's happening, the story falls on its face pretty quickly.

It was important for me early on to find the voice of each character and figure out what was unique about them and their individual worldview that I could use for comedy or conflict.

I make up stories about people who are either imaginary or some variation of myself.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

The idea that I'm going to have to sit down to write some fiction where I'm going to have to think of a plot would really scare me, because it would come out a mess.

Writing is truly a creative art - putting word to a blank piece of paper and ending up with a full-fledged story rife with character and plot.

I know little stories that happen to people around me, and I can repeat that in a way that has some color.

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