David Levithan Quotes

The characters are whole, real people to me that I'm getting to know, and since real people are all flawed, so are my characters, I hope.

I try to write about real women, real people - in other words flawed characters.

I can honestly say I've never thought for a second about whether a character reflects poorly on any group. All that matters to me is that the character is true to my belief in who he or she is.

All of my characters are less than perfect.

What I'm mainly interested in is not having women characters that have to be perfect, obviously. That's something I feel strongly about and have that in every single thing I've ever done.

You don't want to play a perfect person; no one cares about that.

I think that fiction writers can write about anyone. If you are writing a character, and the only thing they are to you is their otherness, then you haven't written a character.

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

I like playing flawed characters, people who aren't perfect.

Female characters in literature are full. They're messy: they've got runny noses and burp and belch. Unfortunately, in film, female characters don't often have that kind of richness.

My very first story, I was around 5, and I really just wrote myself. When I was 5, I loved myself so much I gave myself a twin named Tomi. Everything started out fine. But then I didn't write another black character until I was 18.

I try to create new characters in each book I write. That's what makes writing fun and interesting for me.

I think because I write so many short stories, it's not that hard to come up with characters that are not me.

I wouldn't like to be a character in one of my books!

That's the novelist's job: to peel back the layers and look underneath.

I think I've written 40 books, and none of them have been heavy on action. I'm an introspective person.

I'm just trying to write a good story, strictly from imagination. People just think it's random, they don't see the rewriting, phrasing of characters, choosing the words, bringing the world to light in which the characters live in. That creates an illusion that this is real.

I love... What's gratifying to me is when you make/create a character and a human being, a person who lives entirely and who has their own existence, just merely from the words on a page.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

All the writing elements are the same. You need to tell a good story... You've got good characters... People think there's some dramatic difference between writing 'Little Bear' and the 'Hunger Games,' and as a writer, for me, there isn't.

I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist.

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 love 'Memory Keeper's Daughter,' but in some ways I think 'The Lake of Dreams' is a stronger book. I was able to tell the story I wanted to tell. That's all you can ever do as a writer. From there on you have no control over it.

The great thing about writing is that you always put yourself in the shoes of the character. If you're doing it right, you can see into the heart of all your characters. Usually, when there's a writing problem, it's because you aren't doing that.

My first job is to write the characters as full and authentic people as well as I can.