Courtney A. Kemp Quotes

I think as an author every character ends up low-key being some kind of self-insert.

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

That's the way I will write characters, put a fair amount of myself in them, and then everyone else who was like that person, I will pick and choose.

One of the things I love about writing is the way you can use what you know and what you've experienced, without actually writing about yourself. I've given many of my experiences and perceptions to many of the characters in the book, but none of them is me.

There are bits of me in all my characters.

All my characters have got a big slice of me in them. A big piece of me, because it's my dialogue and this is the way I think and talk.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

I'm starting to think my narrators' sentences are getting too big for them, and they are getting to sound a bit samey and, more disturbingly, a bit too much like me.

I think all characters are facets of the writer. In a way, they have to be if you're going to write them convincingly.

In the past, I'll admit, I've enjoyed being compared to the protagonists in my screenplays.

I've always thought a novelist only has one character, and that is himself or herself. In my case, me.

There's some of me in all my characters.

I do not believe that with a fictional character you can force yourself too far away from yourself. There has to be some of you in it.

There are fragments of me in all my characters.

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

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

Your source material is the people you know, not those you don't know, but every character is an extension of the author's own personality.

I've always kind of ripped from real life to some degree or at least how I'm feeling in the moment. In fact, maybe that's really it. In anything I've ever written, all the characters sound like me, which I don't think is a bad thing.

I see people sometimes who remind me of my narrators.

I've written short stories from male perspectives before, and I've never had a problem with it as long as I've understood the character's emotions and motivations.

I discovered that writing was very nice indeed when I was very young, and I never changed. I don't think my style has changed very much at all - though I hope what I say is a bit more interesting. It's about getting to know a character and loving them, I think.

In my early writing, all of my characters were exactly the same person. They all spoke the same, made the same types of jokes, reacted the same, etc. I think they were all just me in disguise.

I am like my characters - sometimes even the female ones.

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.

Perhaps, all writers walk such a line. In general - as we all do in our dreams - I believe I put something of myself into all the characters in my novels, male as well as female.