Paul Park Quotes

All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely different medium.

I don't want to be a commentator of my own work. If you've written the story, you've said what you want to say.

I think as an author every character ends up low-key being some kind of self-insert.

There is a part of me in every character, naturally. That's why novelists rarely write good autobiographies. You start one and it becomes another novel.

Your source material is the people you know, not those you don't know, but every character is an extension of the author's own personality.

One of the things I love about writing is the way you can use what you know and what you've experienced, without actually writing about yourself. I've given many of my experiences and perceptions to many of the characters in the book, but none of them is me.

All of my characters are a little bit based on people I know in real life. You know when you do that you have to change the character a little bit in case your friend or your relative reads the book, because you don't want them to know you wrote about them... They might get mad.

I think every fiction writer, to a certain extent, is a schizophrenic and able to have two or three or five voices in his or her body. We seek, through our profession, to get those voices onto paper.

There are bits of me in all my characters.

Every character a writer creates has some of themselves in it somewhere.

People are always thinking that I'm the main character in my books, but each one has been different, and sometimes they've been men.

People always want to identify a writer with their protagonist.

All my characters have got a big slice of me in them. A big piece of me, because it's my dialogue and this is the way I think and talk.

All the characters in my books are imagined, but all have a bit of who I am in them - much like the characters in your dreams are all formed by who you are.

I think all characters are facets of the writer. In a way, they have to be if you're going to write them convincingly.

There is an element of autobiography in all fiction in that pain or distress, or pleasure, is based on the author's own. But in my case that is as far as it goes.

My writing is a very authentic journey of discovery. I'm going out there to learn who I am. My readers, consequently, take the same journey as my protagonist.

It's always hard for a writer to make herself into a character; I had to figure out what my defining characteristics were, and that's something I had to work through multiple drafts to figure out.

I've always thought a novelist only has one character, and that is himself or herself. In my case, me.

Writing, for me, when I'm writing in the first-person, is like a form of acting. So as I'm writing, the character or self I'm writing about and my whole self - when I began the book - become entwined. It's soon hard to tell them apart. The voice I'm trying to explore directs my own perceptions and thoughts.

When you write a show, every character is you to some extent.

It's really a misconception to identify the writer with the main character, given that the author creates all the characters in the book. In certain ways, I'm every character. Then again, there is a huge gap between me as a person and what I do in the novel.

I don't ever really know where I get my characters from.

For me, a novel is always the result of my attempt to impose myself on raw circumstances. It is a concrete form of lived experience.

There's not a strong autobiographical strain in my fiction. A few bits of fact here and there.