Lisa Jewell Quotes

The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about the characters are going through and to experience the moral paradoxes and struggles of being human.

In fiction, the reader will make jumps with you. If you can make the reader make that leap with you, it's a thrilling moment for everyone.

You know what? I wanna play something that is really... it changes the game. I don't wanna be the same story where it's the Charles Bronson formula, where he's getting revenge or whatever.

I love all my characters. I love their weaknesses and flaws. I feel like they're all my best friends and I adore being with them.

My fictitious characters will take the bit between their teeth and gallop off and do something that I hadn't counted on. However, I always insist on dragging them back to the straight and narrow.

I'm a big fan of Elmore Leonard, and I've read Ian Rankin, Christopher Brookmyre and so on. But I'd never read a crime novel that made me feel emotional at the end.

On 'The Messenger,' just imagining playing the part of a soldier in that movie was kind of hard for me. And in 'Rampart,' the idea of playing a cop was even harder. It was hard to imagine myself as a cop.

I think one of the successes of Gladiator is how we manage to turn on a dime the character from one thing to another where you believe he is one thing and he is something very different.

I don't enjoy putting my characters through hell unless there's a reason. I don't use violence or anything just for shock value. They're always a means to an end.

If you can't laugh at your own characters, or shed a tear for them, or even get angry at one of them, no one else will either.

As a novelist, I remain interested in the notion of a single reckless act and its consequences.

Action fiction is driven more by what than by who. Put that ticking nuclear suitcase under Manhattan, and it's relatively easy to create suspense. Literary fiction is driven more by who than by what.

Stories need stupid decisions that, at the time, seem absolutely rational and necessary. Without stupid decisions, the world isn't thrown out of balance, and so there's no need for a 'rest of the story' to balance it back.

Fiction's about what it is to be a human being.

You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.

I'd like to make character-based dramas. I end up writing thrillers a lot - these psychological character-based things with weird people doing horrible things to each other - coming to a theatre near you!

Before 'Wings' came out, I told a few people that at the end of book one, readers should think Laurel made the right choice. Then, at the end of 'Spells,' they should understand why Laurel made the choice she did.

A movie is about human beings, about humanity.

I love to make even villains people you can relate to. When you find out who did it, I think you almost like the person, which is not easy to do.

My job as the actress playing Hanna Schmitz, as the actress playing any part, is to understand the character, and to ultimately love the character. And I did love Hanna, absolutely, because I understood her as profoundly as I did at the end of the day.

A lot of people have always asked, is Penn Cage me? And I say no. There's an early character in an earlier novel, 'Mortal Fear,' that's closer to me.

You can't play a guy who's just a snake, because what do you draw on?

One of the great things about fiction is you can use an issue and describe it in human terms.

The challenge is, how do you take someone who's supposed to be a villain and make that appealing and lovable? You have to empathize with him and put yourself in his shoes and root for him and want him to have the things he wants.

People often talk about the characters in books as if they were considering whom to invite to a dinner party. 'Oh, I just hated her - she was so mean.' 'He's a bully; I didn't like how he treated his mother.'