Brian K. Vaughan Quotes

What I do in the writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself. It is the act of a writer's imagination that I set the most high.

Writing fiction is a good way to inhabit other minds, if not other lives.

As a writer, it is always fun to imagine yourself in someone else's shoes.

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.

In the ongoing celebration that is literature, we are asked to imagine ourselves as other selves, for better or worse.

If you read literature, you put yourself in somebody else's shoes. You learn from great figures in literature.

When I write, I'm constantly putting myself in the position of someone else as I write using myriad voices; I think that's a life skill all people should learn.

Part of being a fiction writer is being able to imagine how someone else is thinking and feeling. I think I've always been good at that.

The joy of writing drama is putting yourself into different people's heads.

Writing fiction, like reading fiction, is a practice in empathy.

That's really the essence of what any fiction writer does. Some of it is research-based, but most of it is a really long-term, imaginative, empathetic effort to see the world the way someone whose experiences remote from yours might see it. Not every writer works that way; some writers make a wonderful career out of writing books that adhere very closely to how they view the world. The further I go with this, the more interested I get in trying to imagine my way into other perspectives that at first seem foreign to me.

If I write a character, instead of looking from the outside, like maybe a journalist would, trying to describe them physically and figuring out what kind of things they might be interested in or have in their house, I don't really do it that way. I try to feel what it would be like to be inside this person, to be them.

What I try to do in writing any character is to put myself in his position.

Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.

I write novels and other things.

It doubles your perception, to write from the point of view of someone you're not.

My characters are fictional. I get ideas from real people, sometimes, but my characters always exist only in my head.

One of the amazing things about writing fiction is that you do get to be other people.

When I try to understand somebody, create a character, I fall into them. When I think writers are telling me what to think, I get harrumphy.

I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.

I wrote my first play at the age of 10, 55 years ago, and I've always found it a fantastic relief to imagine I know what things would be like from the point of view of other individuals and to send out signals from where I actually am not. Playwrights never need to write from the place where they are.

Kids don't read as much as you'd like them to, just in terms of seeing the world from different perspectives. I mean, that's the great thing about books, still. Here's television, here are the movies, and it's pretty limited in terms of the perspectives.

I love creating characters and becoming someone else entirely.

One of the things about writing fiction is that you create people that you feel, more or less, as though you know.

While I was in high school, I discovered and began writing science fiction.