Hari Kunzru Quotes

I made Tony a person. For me, Tony was real. I made him become a human being, and that affected the animation and everything.

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.

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.

In the case of the 'Saint' movie, I did do some research. I visited a few shelters. But usually, my stuff just comes out. I don't have any control over that.

I think my characters with my fingers, I think my characters with my guts. But when I say I think them, that is what I do, I feel them with the sympathetic neurons and I work out with my brain what it is that I am trying to write about, or I can't do it.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

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

To imagine yourself inside another person... is what a storywriter does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose.

I want to have compassion for my characters - I feel like I am the characters when I'm writing them.

What I love about my work is that I'm forced to look through my character's eyes.

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

I don't want to draw from my own experiences in life. I first like to become the character and then think from her point of view.

I can't tell a story just by deciding to tell a story, do it in a didactic way. I need to have my own emotion, to feel, 'Wow, there is something I can discover, I can create.'

Some people say, 'Well you're a man; how do you write about women or girls when you don't know about them?' Well, I've got my imagination, and I can write about women. Yes, I'll never be pregnant and give birth to children, but I can imagine a bit of what it's like. When you create characters, it's just about making them really real to people.

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.

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

I think in a lot of ways, writing, when you're really in there, is like being an actress because you're in somebody else's head.

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.

I had begun to write novels because of a fierce, self-serving impulse in my own heart. I had not considered the potential in a book for felt communion, the bright largesse of intimately participating in the lives of other people.

When I'm writing a song, I try to be the character.

I try and create for the audience something that relates to real-life experience.

When I'm writing a story, which takes me a year or more, I can feel my character living with me - they're responding to whatever funny, familial, or social situation I'm in, and I think about their responses constantly.

I always find stuff in my characters to relate to.

Sometimes my lyrics may describe a situation that happened to a friend. Other times, I create a story from the ground up.