Character Autonomy Quotes

Very few of my characters are based on people I've known. It is too constricting.

When your characters are really living they tell you what they do.

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.

It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.

Plot springs from character... I've always sort of believed that these people inside me- these characters- know who they are and what they're about and what happens, and they need me to help get it down on paper because they don't type.

When I sit down to write a scene, I have a plan in mind, and I'm thrilled when a character disregards my goals and takes the story to a place I hadn't imagined.

The bad novelist constructs his characters; he directs them and makes them speak. The true novelist listens to them and watches them act; he hears their voices even before he knows them.

Am I a guy who writes about himself in a comic book, or am I just a character in that book? If I die, will that character keep going, or will he just fade away?

I never regard my characters, my protagonists, as personifications. It's not that I sit by my desk and I pick up a character who will be the spokesperson of the Israeli Left, another one will be the spokesperson of the Right, another one will be the spokesperson of Middle Eastern Jews, European Jews, religions Jews and so on.

Over and over I feel as if my characters know who they are, and what happens to them, and where they have been and where they will go, and what they are capable of doing, but they need me to write it down for them because their handwriting is so bad.

I do not speak through my characters; it's not a ventriloquist act.

For me, everyone I write of is real. I have little true say in what they want, what they do or end up as (or in). Their acts appall, enchant, disgust or astound me. Their ends fill me with retributive glee, or break my heart. I can only take credit (if I can even take credit for that) in reporting the scenario. This is not a disclaimer. Just a fact.

For the most part, my characters don't talk to me. I like to lord over them like some kind of benevolent deity. And, for the most part, my characters go along with it. I write intense character sketches and long, play-like conversations between me and them, but they stay out of the book writing itself.

When you start writing the magic comes when the characters seem to take on a life of their own and write the words for themselves.

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.

Nothing, I find, has prepared me for the sight of my own characters walking about. A playwright or screenwriter must expect it; a novelist doesn't and naturally concludes that she has gone mad.

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.

I'm one of those writers who, when writing, believes she's god-and that she hasn't bestowed free will on any of her characters. In that sense there are no surprises in any of my books.

There are times that you have a plot in your head, but then you find that the characters don't want to do that. When you're looking at the story from the outside, you can create whatever twists and turns you want. But when you're writing, you're inside the characters' heads, and you see that they may be motivated to do something different.

Actually, I get a little say in what my character would or wouldn't do.

The art of fiction is freedom of will for your characters.

One nourishes one's created characters with one's own substance: it's rather like the process of gestation. To give the character life, or to give him back life, it is of course necessary to fortify him by contributing something of one's own humanity, but it doesn't follow from that that the character is I, the writer, or that I am the character. The two entities remain distinct.

Political theatre presents an entirely different set of problems. Sermonising has to be avoided at all cost. Objectivity is essential. The characters must be allowed to breathe their own air. The author cannot confine and constrict them to satisfy his own taste or disposition or prejudice.

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.

I become my characters, and then try to allow events in the story to take their own course. I try not to play God, but to let them work out their own destiny.