Kevin Kwan Quotes

It is a wonderful thing in the process of writing when such paper characters are first sketched, and, when one is doing good work, from a certain point in time they come alive and start contradicting the author as well.

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.

As an author you hope your characters have sparks but truly in the end they have minds of their own!

You can't really write until the characters kind of show up one day and tell you what they're going to say. You start to hear the rhythm of the way the people talk, and then it becomes easier.

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 suppose it's possible that a writer would have feeling for his characters, but I can't see how, because writing is such a meticulous, intricate, technical business. I wish I could say that I love my characters and that frequently they take over the book and run away with the plot and so on. But they don't exist.

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.

The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him.

As a writer, I always think about who my prototype actors are, in my brain. It's helpful, as a writer, to think about that.

When you create a show, and create characters, these people are like children to you.

It can certainly happen that characters in more sophisticated stories can 'take over' as they develop and change the author's original ideas. Well, it certainly happens to me at times.

My characters surprise me constantly. My characters are like my friends - I can give them advice, but they don't have to take it. If your characters are real, then they surprise you, just like real people.

Since I don't outline my books very much, I feel like sometimes I don't have a choice in what the characters do; they just kind of take over sometimes.

Characters are not created on paper or laptop alone.

I love all the characters I write.

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

Unlike life, you've got more or less complete control over what's going on in your stories. That's not to say you can make characters do whatever you want them to - they usually have a life of their own if you've done your job properly.

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

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.

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

I always believed in my characters. I lived them.

I find it an easy way into writing pieces is to think what the character's voice is like, and start from there.

When I wrote for TV, I was always thinking in terms of character and story. After fifteen years, it became hard-wired in me.

The great thing about writing is that you always put yourself in the shoes of the character. If you're doing it right, you can see into the heart of all your characters. Usually, when there's a writing problem, it's because you aren't doing that.