Real-Life Inspiration Quotes

There's something very cool as an actor when you have an opportunity to play somebody who's real, whether they're still alive or not, but who has lived a life.

Are my characters copies of people in real life? ... Don't ever believe the stories about authors putting people into novels. That idea is a kind of joke on both authors and readers. All the readers believe that authors do it. All the authors know that it can't be done.

I like when they say a movie is inspired by a true story. That's kind of silly. "Hey, Mitch, did you hear that story about that lady who drove her car into the lake with her kids and they all drowned?" "Yeah, I did, and you know what - that inspires me to write a movie about a gorilla!"

I've always wanted to do a role based on a real-life person.

I like, for instance, 'Serpico.' I enjoyed playing Serpico because Frank Serpico was there. He existed. He was a real life person and I could - I could embody him. I could, you know, I could work and get to know him and have him help me with the text, the script and become him. It's almost like a painter having a model to become.

When you write a roman a clef, there is a tendency on the part of the reader to wonder how much of this is true, how much invented.

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

I did this movie right after it about the life of Chet Baker. It's called Born to Be Blue. In that situation, there's a real clear character you're drawing on. It's a real person. It's really exciting and interesting to do the research to figure out how to make that a nuanced, three-dimensional human being.

All these movies are observational comedies. I see somebody, maybe a dry cleaner, and notice how they are. Maybe I'll decide to turn a person with those traits into a studio chief.

It was a pity that movies and live TV left New York for Hollywood. London theater, movies, television - until (Britain's) money ran out - were always better than ours since the city was the political capital of the country, as well as the artistic and literary one. In L.A. we've always been slightly sealed off from real life. It's no accident that two of our most interesting directors, Woody Allen and Bob Altman, are more or less settled in the real world.

Every song I've ever written has been based in reality, based in fact, things that happen to me.

I lived around the man who was the model for Buffalo Bill in the movie 'Silence of the Lambs.'

Will Smith played Chris Gardner better than Chris Gardner ever did.

There will always be a slight difference between the reel and the real. Even my family might know 99 per cent about me, but there will be this one per cent about me that nobody will ever know. Being in this profession, I am fine with biopics or movies inspired by real-life-characters.

I tend to wait for true stories to mature into fiction. Most of my fiction grew out of a long-germinating real-life situation.

I can't act, and so I have to live that particular character in my real life and then exhibit it on screen.

One never knows enough about characters in real life to put them into novels. One gets started and then, suddenly, one can not remember what toothpaste they use; what are their views on interior decoration, and one is stuck utterly. No, major characters emerge; minor ones may be photographed.

The character of Rosie is based on a woman who used to live in the same apartment building I lived in many years ago. She's taken on a life of her own, of course.

Whatever you have lived, you can write & by hard work & a genuine apprenticeship, you can learn to write well; but what you have not lived you cannot write, you can only pretend to write it.

Playing somebody who's real, you can bring all kind of nuances and things to him that you get from source material and things like that, but the more popular or known the person is, the more impossible it is. To get it right, that is the goal.

The relationship between Cathy and Mom in the strip is the one relationship drawn from real life that I have proudly never even tried to disguise.

In one book, CACHALOT, just for my own amusement, every character is based directly on someone I have known.

When I find the character, I try to spend time with them and get to know them very well. Therefore my notes are not from the character that I had in my mind before, but are instead based on the people I've met in real life.

We weave our real lives into our WWE lives. We just look at what's happening in our lives, and what can we do? What's the most annoying - as a bad guy, as a villain, what's the thing we can do to make people hate us?

We try to find the information, the clues, to unlock the play or the story or our characters, especially when they're based on real people that live and breathe.