Nicholas Sparks Quotes

All the great writers root their characters in true human behaviour.

Most good fiction also has a character the writer seems to know more deeply than anyone can actually be known in life, but a few unusual writers can make something great without that.

I don't really base any of my characters on specific people that I know, although my characters are informed by the kind of people who live in my community.

Characters are an extension of your imagination.

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.

My first job is to write the characters as full and authentic people as well as I can.

It's hard to know whether certain characters come to life or not, they either come to have their own life or they don't. I've written many things in which the characters just remain inert.

I always say I write my own novels and the characters don't take control of me, but in fact, I look at the characters in the early stages and I think, 'What is he or she like,' and they slowly come together and they become the person they are.

The main characters for 'The Seer and the Sword' made an appearance one night and then haunted me for over five years before I began to write them down. Does that count as inspiration? For me, characters tend to show up, stay on to help with the work of writing their stories, and then occasionally deign to visit after a book is finished.

I treat all my characters as if they were real, and I am scrupulous about the details of their lives.

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.

I don't base any character on a real person, and really don't do composites either. I make them up.

I try to ground most of my characters in reality somehow. That's kind of what I bring to the table.

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.

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

I think every character I've ever come up with has been based on someone or something I've known.

One of the things about writing fiction is that you create people that you feel, more or less, as though you know.

One has to be able to twist and change and distort characters, play with them like clay, so everything fits together. Real people don't permit you to do that.

I always try to write about believable people.

I try to talk about things I know about. But my characters are more of a combination of people or how I imagine people would feel.

I always talk about my characters like they're real people.

Novelists embody plural selves all the time. What are characters, after all, if not other selves?

My characters are all made up of pieces of people I have known, their backstories pieces of mine.

My characters are based on people I know, but not in a direct way.

As writers, we are sketching people all the time when we write fiction.