Diana Gabaldon Quotes

Your source material is the people you know, not those you don't know, but every character is an extension of the author's own personality.

I came into this business to create characters that moved people and told stories.

It's really a misconception to identify the writer with the main character, given that the author creates all the characters in the book. In certain ways, I'm every character.

Creating characters is like throwing together ingredients for a recipe. I take characteristics I like and dislike in real people I know, or know of, and use them to embellish and define characters.

Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.

I think, when I write, one of the things that I'm really attempting to do is I'm attempting to humanize my characters.

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

To combine telling an interesting story with brilliantly written characters is the most difficult thing to do.

Outside books, we avoid colorful characters.

What makes characters real are details, and if you're crafting a person from scratch, you're probably not going to pay as much attention to a question like, 'Does this person bite their nails?'

I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.

One of the things I love about writing is the way you can use what you know and what you've experienced, without actually writing about yourself. I've given many of my experiences and perceptions to many of the characters in the book, but none of them is me.

I usually don't find myself reacting to my characters. I just create them ... And let the audience decide whether they're empathetic or scared or compelled to cheer me on.

We start with strong characters and build the movie from there. That not to say we don't struggle with story - that's the most challenging part.

So much of what I do... is coming up with new characters and trying to invent voices for them, and to have people fully fleshed out in my head and to know who can say what in the scene and who these characters are... I love it.

When you're creating a character out of nothing, you have to make all the guesses as to how they walk, how they talk, how they think. It was all there on the table for us to pick and choose for Murrow.

When I create a character, it happens in layers. The more I write and revise, the better I understand the characters.

I think all characters are facets of the writer. In a way, they have to be if you're going to write them convincingly.

When you're building a character, or at least when I'm building a character, you start saying, 'How am I going to make people like him?'

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.

You establish a technique on how to develop characters. Everyone does it their own way, and that's what makes it fun.

There are so many characters whizzing around inside my head, it's like Looney Tunes. But as soon as I've finished writing about them, I completely forget who they are.

One of the challenges is creating characters. I am trying to compose my sentences to express epic events happening to ordinary people.

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

I take stuff from real life and try to make a character out of it. And I try to live the world of the characters a little bit.