Jeff Nichols Quotes

I write characters and stories that move me, and I write from the heart.

I always prefer to write songs about emotional situations and heartbreak because I like getting into the character.

I'm not in the business of meddling with people's destinies - and yes, my characters are real people to me. They have histories and thoughts and yearnings and hurts and misgivings and pleasures that don't belong to me.

If the script is telling the story well, that is your inspiration, and you do not need to go somewhere else.

I try to sort of make myself emotional in the moment when I'm writing, and that always translates better. When I'm writing, I can't do abstract.

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.

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.

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.

As an actress, I'm drawn to emotion and expressing the human condition in all its forms, and I'm fortunate to have thoughts and feelings at my fingertips.

For me, inspiration isn't a sort of spark which lights the fire of the story. It's more like a thread, one of many, which you can tease out of a story once it's written, if you feel so inclined.

I do want to write about Jane Whitefield again, but only when I have a good enough idea - something I've figured out about her that's news and that's worth a reader's time.

Fiction, at its best, is a radical act of intimacy. It seeks to join, to merge, to know deeply; and, as with intimacy, there is a way in which it cannot be faked.

If I ever wrote a script myself, it would be strongly emotional material.

I like to build a character, trying to stretch my imagination as far to the walls of my brain as I can to come up with something that feels truthful and feels real - as close to the skin as I can get it.

All fiction relies on the real world in the sense that we all take in the world through our five senses and we accumulate details, consciously or subconsciously. This accumulation of detail can be drawn on when you write fiction.

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.

It's been a while since I've written a novel aimed at the adult market, but I never sit down and say to myself, 'Okay, now I'm going to write something for us old folks.' I get gripped by an idea, and I go where the idea takes me.

A book begins with an image or character or situation that I care about deeply.

I strongly believe that the art of the novel works best when the writer identifies with whoever he or she is writing about. Novels in the end are based on the human capacity, compassion, and I can show more compassion to my characters if I write in a first person singular.

There is an element of autobiography in all fiction in that pain or distress, or pleasure, is based on the author's own. But in my case that is as far as it goes.

If I don't have a project going, I sit down and begin to write something - a character sketch, a monologue, a description of some sight, or even just a list of ideas.

I think 'Dark Blue' came to me while I was doing a project in London. I read it, and the character immediately popped out at me.

A good novel is something that challenges perception, that allows you to see the world anew through a different point of view - something that genre fiction doesn't do, although it sells more because it doesn't disturb people's innate sense of what a novel should be about. Often, people want characters to be nice, for example.

I'm not standing above the audience trying to manipulate them as a puppet master or a trickster; I'm inside the story I'm writing and making and thinking about things very seriously and feeling very deeply at times, and trying to translate that into a narrative.

When I do my best work, the stories tend to be pretty emotionally-charged.