V. S. Naipaul Quotes

Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.

I usually don't find myself reacting to my characters. I just create them ... And let the audience decide whether they're empathetic or scared or compelled to cheer me on.

I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people.

I'll often dream about characters before I start writing their stories.

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.

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.

People are always thinking that I'm the main character in my books, but each one has been different, and sometimes they've been men.

I love making characters real and believable, through my own experience and choices.

I put a lot of myself into my characters when I write.

As a writer of fiction, I spend my days inventing real lives for make-believe people; what I create can only seem real.

I really enjoy working in genre series, because you really have to create the characters.

No I don't really write thinking about specific actors because it can get in the way a little bit.

I have tried very hard as a novelist to say, 'Novels are about individuals and especially larger than life individuals.'

I love all the characters I write.

When I was writing my first novel, 'Elizabeth is Missing,' I was writing the only novel I had ever written and writing about the only protagonist I'd ever written about. Because of this, I didn't think of her as a construct. Maud was real.

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

To combine telling an interesting story with brilliantly written characters is the most difficult thing to do.

There's not a strong autobiographical strain in my fiction. A few bits of fact here and there.

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.

How I work is I work from of very character-driven place. And I trust the writers.

The writer of stories or of novels settles on men and imitates them; he exhausts the possibilities of his characters.

When you write, you hear the characters speaking to you as you take dictation from what they say. And obviously, they had particular personalities when you hear them.

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

At the end of the day, it's really, really difficult to make a brand-new show, to write a pilot where you have to introduce characters and everyone has to kind of be dynamic and have something different for themselves.

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.