Molly Antopol Quotes

There's some of me in all my characters.

It is very enjoyable, writing a story. You get this idea. It takes hold of you. And then you spend day and night thinking about how to do it. And then you do it. And much later, you think, 'Oh, yes. That's an interesting question.'

I don't ever really know where I get my characters from.

Whichever character I'm using and wherever I am in my mind dictates what kind of story I'm going to tell.

After a while, the characters I'm writing begin to feel real to me. That's when I know I'm heading in the right direction.

'For Whom the Bell Tolls' was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

What comes to me always is a character, a scene, a moment. That's going to be the beginning. Then, as I write, I begin to perceive an ending. I begin to see a destination, although sometimes that changes. And then, of course, there's the whole middle section looming.

When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him.

Most of the time, when I'm writing, I'm writing for myself. I'm thinking, 'What will my character say at this time? What will come out of her mouth?' I create individuals so real to me, I sometimes start talking to them. Then I let them loose on the page.

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

My characters live inside my head for a long time before I actually start a book about them. Then, they become so real to me I talk about them at the dinner table as if they are real. Some people consider this weird. But my family understands.

When you're a writer, if you're very lucky, you create these characters that you fall in love with, and you feel like they're guiding you rather than you guiding them.

Any author gets inspired by the experiences and events that happen to him or his immediate circle. While that's where the seed or the idea germinates, by the end of the story, it accounts for hardly anything in the book.

I love all the characters I write.

There are fragments of me in all my characters.

I wrote a story about a character who looks like Harry Styles. But it has nothing to do with Harry Styles at all.

Often what happens with the writing is that you know where you want to start and you know where you want to end, but the journey is never quite what you predict because the characters take on a life on their own.

I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think happens in a child's mind, without him even knowing he has aspirations as a writer.

My novels come from within me; they are things I feel I want to do.

I spent some time, six months or so, ruminating about the characters before I sat down to write 'Faith'.

Each book is a separate entity for me. When I'm writing it, I enter its world and inhabit its vocabulary. I forget, as it were, that I ever wrote anything else.

I throw everything I have into whatever story I'm writing - and so there's something immensely gratifying about finishing one piece and then starting fresh with a new setting, time period and cast of characters, getting to see the world through a completely different lens each time.

It's usually easier for me to begin writing in a character's voice if that person is different from me in some significant way.

Even if I never sold another book, I'd keep writing, because the stories are here, in my head. Stories that just need to be told. I love watching a plot unfold, and feeling the surprise when the unexpected happens.

You spend so much time writing a character the way I did with Buddy Baker and then Green Arrow that you start to care about them. And you almost think of them as people, you know?