Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

All my main characters have got bits of me, bits of my family, bits of my friends.

I think every character I've ever come up with has been based on someone or something I've known.

For the most part, there's so much of me in my characters.

There are bits of me in all my characters.

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

There's some of me in all my characters.

My characters are based on people I know, but not in a direct way.

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

I see people sometimes who remind me of my narrators.

In my early writing, all of my characters were exactly the same person. They all spoke the same, made the same types of jokes, reacted the same, etc. I think they were all just me in disguise.

One of the ways I think I gain fodder for characters is by watching people.

Sometimes a character is really based on research that you do. Other times it's just based on your imagination or perhaps your conversation with the director. Or sometimes all of the above. It depends on the movie and character.

When you create a show, and create characters, these people are like children to you.

I put a lot of myself into my characters when I write.

The point of my explanation is I'm very subjective when it comes to describing my characters: they are all a little bit a part of me from the outside in or the inside out - but to put your mind at ease, I built Paul Snider from the outside in.

So much of my own life inspires what I write. Whether it's work, family, friends, motherhood, I am a writer who tends to write what she knows. In 'Revenge Wears Prada,' a great deal of my own life finds its way into the book.

My characters live inside my head for a long time before I actually start a book about them. Then, they become so real to me I talk about them at the dinner table as if they are real. Some people consider this weird. But my family understands.

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

There are fragments of me in all my characters.

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.

All of my characters tend to be montages of different people I've met: little bits and pieces of their personalities put together.

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.

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.

I don't like to analyze what I do too much, but I certainly never meet a single person and say, 'You're the next character.' People think that's what I do. They also think that I sit down and observe and try to imitate random people. I've never done that at all.

I started improvising the Cliff character, based on someone I grew up with.