Darin Strauss Quotes

The best thing about being a fiction writer is that where the truth is inconvenient, I could veer away.

An author's characters do what he wants them to do.

Everyone who sits on a sofa watching 'Match of the Day' is a top soccer expert, as you know. So if you start to worry about such people reading your story and saying, 'That'd never happen' you're going to freeze up. You're writing fiction, and your characters can do whatever you need them to do.

If you write a story based on a real person, you're trapped by the details of the real person and his life. It gets in the way of writing your own story.

Novelists have always had complete freedom to pretty much tell their story any way they saw fit. And that's what I'm trying to do.

Storytellers have the right to answer any question they choose.

Being a novelist, you can roam around with a story and indulge yourself.

The characters have their own lives and their own logic, and you have to act accordingly.

This is one of the ways fiction is more liberating than nonfiction - I don't have to be so concerned with fact. I had the paradigm of certain people in my head who became my characters, but I never considered these people to be from a "certain sector of society," unless we agree that we're all from certain sectors of society.

As a filmmaker, you are going to manipulate the character as you need to make the scenes work.

One of the things when you write, well the way I write, is that you are writing your scenario and there are different roads that become available that the characters could go down. Screenwriters will have a habit of putting road blocks up against some of those roads because basically they can't afford to have their characters go down there because they think they are writing a movie or trying to sell a script or something like that. I have never put that kind of imposition on my characters. Wherever they go I follow.

The great thing about fiction is that you can start off by telling the truth, then start making stuff up like crazy whenever you feel like it.

The art of fiction is freedom of will for your characters.

As much as I really like the screenwriting thing, the novel is where the author has so much control.

Freedom to tell any story I want, with all the imaginary tools of my trade, is why I love writing novels. I love taking an idea, fleshing it out into a new world - and going on adventures with characters who day-dream themselves into existence and take on lives of their own.

Since I don't outline my books very much, I feel like sometimes I don't have a choice in what the characters do; they just kind of take over sometimes.

As a storyteller, I've always been fascinated with the idea of recreating this notion of choices in fiction. My dream was to put the audience in the shoes of the main protagonists, let them make their own decisions, and by doing so, let them tell their own stories.

I'm a writer of fiction. I try to write about my time, but it's dangerous if I'm seen as an investigative writer. I manipulate and change and control.

I make hip-hop, but use Doom as a character to convey stories that a normal dude can't. You have writers that write about crazy characters, but that doesn't mean the writer himself is crazy.

We often compare the experience of writing a book to that of playing God. It is up to us, and only us, to determine what happens to the people we invent. It is for us alone to determine what is good and bad, just and unjust, appropriate and inappropriate for the worlds we create. I love that about writing books.

My job, in general, is nonfiction, so writing fiction was liberating. If you can't find the answer to something, you just make it up!

I just respond to the stories I'm being asked to tell.

There are things you can say in the voice of a fictional character that you could not explore any other way.

In Total Nonstop Action, individual wrestlers have a lot more freedom to artistically express themselves versus WWE.

You have to do what the story demands, but inside of those constraints, I try to inject as much realistic physics as I'm allowed to.