Neil Gaiman Quotes

I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.

I like movies about people and movies with characters; that's what I'm drawn to as a person who likes to create these characters within the story, but I like it all, really.

One of the things I love about writing is the way you can use what you know and what you've experienced, without actually writing about yourself. I've given many of my experiences and perceptions to many of the characters in the book, but none of them is me.

I'm first and foremost interested in the story, the characters.

I think it's a short story writer's duty, as well as writing well about emotions and characters, to write story.

I try to ground most of my characters in reality somehow. That's kind of what I bring to the table.

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

You read about somebody, and it doesn't really matter whether or not they really exist - the point is that you get into them like real characters.

Usually, people write the characters into a box, and that's just not true to life.

I've never purposefully based a character on any one person I know, but I'm certain there are amalgamations that exist.

I'm interested in characters and relationships.

Characters are an extension of your imagination.

The art of the novel is to arrive at that artless point where your characters become more real than yourself.

Of course I know that the twins are only words on a page, and I'm certainly not the sort of writer who talks to his characters or harbours any illusions about the creative process. But at the same time, I think it's juvenile and arrogant when literary writers compulsively remind their readers that the characters aren't real. People know that already. The challenge is to make an intelligent reader suspend disbelief, to seduce them into the reality of a narrative.

A great novelist excels on the small scale and the large, the individual leaf and root as well as the forest; good fiction convinces us that the imaginary is real by selecting exactly the right detail and rendering it perfectly.

For me, everyone I write of is real. I have little true say in what they want, what they do or end up as (or in). Their acts appall, enchant, disgust or astound me. Their ends fill me with retributive glee, or break my heart. I can only take credit (if I can even take credit for that) in reporting the scenario. This is not a disclaimer. Just a fact.

As writers, we are sketching people all the time when we write fiction.

Because reading is a way of putting yourself in someone else's experience, especially reading fiction.

If you care about [the characters] as if they were real, that always helps.

It doesn't matter whether characters are real people or not; if they're not vivid on the page, then the reader doesn't care about them that much, and, if the reader doesn't care about them that much, then they don't care what happens to them.

All a writer's characters are imaginary, no matter whether they are based on real people or not. They are people as one imagines them to be.

I take the outline from a real person as inspiration, but the in-line is totally made up. Which is why I usually invent imaginary names.

Few real people appear in my two novels, actually. "Ari" appears on the edge of this book a couple of times - but on the edge, she's never in it, even if she's a determining force from the outside. Everybody in the first book was basically made up, if never from scratch.

I've had that situation where I start writing somebody really miserable, and in order to make the story come alive, I have to give them a vote of confidence, make him vulnerable or wounded. But in real life, you often meet people who, in that particular moment, actually shouldn't get a vote of confidence.

Unicorns, dragons, witches may be creatures conjured up in dreams, but on the page their needs, joys, anguishes, and redemptions should be just as true as those of Madame Bovary or Martin Chuzzlewit.