Ann Aguirre Quotes

Never argue with your characters; they know themselves better than you do.

I'm about my characters.

The interesting thing about fiction from a writer's standpoint is that the characters come to life within you. And yet who are they and where are they? They seem to have as much or more vitality and complexity as the people around you.

As an author you hope your characters have sparks but truly in the end they have minds of their own!

You can really help support a character if you understand the setting. So for that reason I generally write about Philadelphia.

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.

What's the difference between Hollywood characters and my characters? Mine are real.

Creating characters is like throwing together ingredients for a recipe. I take characteristics I like and dislike in real people I know, or know of, and use them to embellish and define characters.

When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him.

I seem to have to make my characters family before I can access their hearts in any way that matters.

I spend a lot of time with my characters.

What I have in advance are people I want to write about and a problem or problems that I see those people encountering and that I want to explore - it all proceeds sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and scene by scene.

Any author of fiction will tell you that characters don't need to be told what to do.

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

My stories are character driven.

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.

I think a conceptual idea comes to me first - something I've been mulling over a lot right before I feel like writing a book - and then the characters start to develop around it.

I have a huge emotional attachment to characters I've created, especially the viewpoint characters.

Most of the time, when I'm writing, I'm writing for myself. I'm thinking, 'What will my character say at this time? What will come out of her mouth?' I create individuals so real to me, I sometimes start talking to them. Then I let them loose on the page.

What I'm really trying to do is create unique characters.

There is nothing that's been in any of my novels that, in my view, hasn't been either illuminating surroundings or defining a character or moving a plot.

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.

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.

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.

You don't go around thinking about how characters in a movie, in the stories you make up, relate to people in general.