Whitley Strieber Quotes

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

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

To me, my characters are more real than most people I meet.

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.

My characters are all made up of pieces of people I have known, their backstories pieces of mine.

When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.

I don't have a clear biography of my own that I could recount in an interesting way. I'm made up of the characters that I pulled out of my head, that I invented.

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

The people I write are real to me, and basically, they tell me about their environments on a need-to-know basis.

Being a novelist is the adult version of a kid creating a make-believe world. But unlike a child, a writer of fiction has to come up with a structured story, one that has as much meaning for others as it has for her.

When you write, you hear the characters speaking to you as you take dictation from what they say. And obviously, they had particular personalities when you hear them.

I don't base any character on a real person, and really don't do composites either. I make them up.

I don't really set out to explore grand themes. I set out to tell a story. And one I have to be able to imagine right through.

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

I try to talk about things I know about. But my characters are more of a combination of people or how I imagine people would feel.

If the characters are not alive to me, it doesn't matter how good the sentences are. It just becomes all cake and no frosting.

Whether writing fiction or nonfiction, I've never had the sense I was 'making up' a character. It feels more like watching people reveal themselves, ever more deeply, more intimately.

The things I write about are completely removed from my own life, but people want to know the characters better.

There are so many characters whizzing around inside my head, it's like Looney Tunes. But as soon as I've finished writing about them, I completely forget who they are.

Part of being a fiction writer is being able to imagine how someone else is thinking and feeling. I think I've always been good at that.

I don't really base any of my characters on specific people that I know, although my characters are informed by the kind of people who live in my community.

A lot of my characters are born out of a small grain in a person that I heighten and take to that next level. They're not based on anyone I've ever met, but they are these extreme versions of something.

When I write a book, characters come to life for me somewhere at the back of my head. I strive to make them flesh and blood in an abstract way, in words.

As a writer of fiction, you don't ever want to limit the characters you create to the life you've lived. That's insanity to me.

When you're writing fiction, you're in every character 'cause you can't help it.