Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

A lot of times characters are combinations of people I come across in life. I people-watch a lot.

I don't believe you just create a character out of thin air, there's always something of yourself you bring.

I always find stuff in my characters to relate to.

All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely different medium.

Every character a writer creates has some of themselves in it somewhere.

They are imaginary characters. But perhaps not solely the products of my imagination, since there are some aspects of the characters that relate to my own experience of a wide variety of people.

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

The point of my explanation is I'm very subjective when it comes to describing my characters: they are all a little bit a part of me from the outside in or the inside out - but to put your mind at ease, I built Paul Snider from the outside in.

A lot of my characters are born out of a small grain in a person that I heighten and take to that next level. They're not based on anyone I've ever met, but they are these extreme versions of something.

Most of my characters are an amalgamation of people that I've met, my family, or myself. Being a writer, you can draw only from what you know. I am lucky to have really rich and interesting people in my family for, you know, interesting family nights and great characters.

I often draw from people in my own experience to base a character on, going back to my days with Mike Leigh.

If you're going to create a character, the tools you use to make that character 'real' are the lives you see around you. The people you listen to on the street. The emotions you see on faces and bodies while you're sitting... in a Starbucks, watching the world go by.

Characters are not created on paper or laptop alone.

I think that, every individual you invent in narrative work, you have to have some root in who that person is. That may be an aspect of yourself; it may be an aspect of something that you like, that you don't like. It may be an aspect that you wish you had. Maybe something you admire in another person.

In all my characters, I try to find an iota of myself, and in Castle, I found a lot. He gets away with a lot, so that's fun.

When I do a character, I try to base it on someone I have met or an experience I've had.

Stories come to me and I don't know where they come from, but afterwards I can look back and say, 'Oh yes, that's got a little bit of me, or a little bit of my own son in it'. That's where ideas come from.

I started improvising the Cliff character, based on someone I grew up with.

The puppet characters were combinations of people I had known and to some degree aspects of my own personality. Weird was based on someone I knew in Chicago. Dirty Dragon was based on a good friend I had in Indianapolis.

There are bits of me in all my characters.

I create fictional narratives, but it's based on literal people.

I guess I see a part of myself in everyone I write about. I tend to write about kids who are obsessed with something, and even though I have never been good with machines the way Hugo is, I did love miniature things when I was a kid.

When you're crafting a character, it's good to have a lot of influences.

What I've tended to do is to use my own experiences to get into someone else's mind, like in Wuthering Heights.

I take stuff from real life and try to make a character out of it. And I try to live the world of the characters a little bit.