Gerard Way Quotes

Something about your life always makes its way into your stories. That's just the nature of the beast.

One of the things that happens in novels it's almost like a continual debate with yourself. That's why you're writing the book. It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.

But it's hard for me to pinpoint where all my characters and dialogue come from - imagination or real life. My memoir, of course, was all about my past, and many of the short stories cleave very closely to my life, but the more stories I wrote in the collection, the more that seemed to be invented, but who knows... I think I'm writing about a young woman with acne who shoplifts, but I'm really writing about myself.

I never base a character on someone I know. You can get ideas from real life, but every character you write is some aspect of yourself.

All the characters on the album are inside me, though none are me. They are sides of me or who I was.

I'm interested in writing that explores all sides of human beings.

Your plays are always personal. You can't help seeing yourself in the serial killer you've just written. But they get less specifically personal.

I should probably be careful admitting this, but sometimes, when my characters are having a disagreement, it's a disagreement I'm having with myself. I can see both sides of the argument.

When I'm writing flawed characters, I just think about my own flaws.

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.

No author can create a character out of nothing. He must have a model to give him a starting point; but then his imagination goes to work, he builds him up, adding a trait here, a trait there, which his model did not possess.

Everyone's different. I mean, some people write journals for their characters and stuff, but that was never really my area.

For me, there's a bad year of getting started on something. You write bad stuff and it's awkward to throw it out, and you wait around to get some good ideas that maybe do come or don't come. Until eventually you get the voice and autonomy of the characters, the characters have personality, and they sort of pick up the weight and put it on their shoulders. That's when it becomes a little more fun.

I think that it's worthwhile to explore the ways in which you write the person that's writing your plays as opposed to simply assuming that it's all a natural process and there's no design in it. Because your public persona is designed, to a certain extent, and you can have fun and profit at various times doing that.

My own feeling is that the only possible reason for engaging in the hard labor of writing a novel, is that one is bothered by something one needs to understand, and can come to understand only through the characters in the imagined situation.

Before I write down one word, I have to have the character in my mind through and through. I must penetrate into the last wrinkle of his soul.

I think anybody who is writing finds he puts a little bit of himself in all of the characters, at least in this kind of a strip. It's the only way that you can survive when you have to do something every day. You have to put yourself, all of your thoughts, all of your observations and everything you know into the strip.

I find it much easier to write comic-books than lyrics actually because it's a natural dialogue. Writing song lyrics is not natural but over the years I know what I need to know to get it done. I find it quite easy to capture a character and use my own personality and humour.

A lot of people think that they are really cool because they don't outline. In my writing group, they would say, "I will never outline. I let the characters take me." C'mon, man - I outline the story, but it's only like one page. It's a list of possible reversals in the story, like things where everything will just change because of this certain reveal or this certain action. Then I start really digging into the character because, to me, I don't care what the story is.

To tell you the truth, I don't ever talk about characters as separate from myself.

Now for the hitch in Jane's character,' he said at last, speaking more calmly than from his look I had expected him to speak. 'The reel of silk has run smoothly enough so far; but I always knew there would come a knot and a puzzle: here it is. Now for vexation, and exasperation, and endless trouble!

I never started from ideas but always from character.

Which is strange - I've always thought of myself as someone who writes out of difficulty. And I did do that, but I came out on the side of light more often than not.

Music and writing do fold together in the sense that you have to have a certain level of skill in order to execute your ideas and you need a medium. The idea of improvisation is one that many writers fall into, and I improvise a great deal when I'm writing, but there's a structural framework that I'm working around, and that takes more time than the actual writing. Once the characters get to yapping and talking, they'll move from one room to the next, and I just have to make sure that the house is built. That's really hard, that's the kind of thing that sits with you all day long.

I love writing every song I can like a little mini movie. I like to have a character, or some characters, and really paint a picture with the song.