Nicholas Sparks Quotes

I don't tend to picture my characters as actors and actresses.

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.

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.

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

My characters live inside my head for a long time before I actually start a book about them. Then, they become so real to me I talk about them at the dinner table as if they are real. Some people consider this weird. But my family understands.

Characters are not created on paper or laptop alone.

Sometimes a character is really based on research that you do. Other times it's just based on your imagination or perhaps your conversation with the director. Or sometimes all of the above. It depends on the movie and character.

People sometimes ask who I would cast in my books and I never have any idea. I don't think I could ever write a book thinking of it as a movie the whole time. This would be like building a house and filling it with furniture just so you could have blueprints.

When I'm writing a woman character, I don't think, 'What would a woman do?' I just think, 'What would this character do in this situation?'

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

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

Every so often when I'm writing, a character might actually be a distinct person in my head - often not an actor or a face, literally a person who just seems to exist in my imagination. Then the challenge is finding somebody who is close enough to that to make me feel like I've ended up where I wanted to be.

I make up names for people all the time - it's part of writing. Very often, the name comes with the character, along with of a sense of who they are and what they do.

I'm the opposite of someone like David Grossman, who knows how his characters walk, and how they smell. I don't allow myself to imagine what mine look like at all. My sense of them comes from the inside. They remain, by necessity, physically vague in my mind.

I suppose it's easier for most writers to create and vivify characters of their own gender.

I work out the other bits, too, but I need to know what I look like, very early on. And then it's like a template; I'll fill that person out. If I get that out of the way, then I'm all right.

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.

Once I started to value and respect my characters, I could really hear them. I just let them start talking.

As a storyteller, when you see somebody who is the character you envisioned, you feel this energy in the room.

Early on in the writing, there is often a sentence that pins down a character for me.

When you're writing fiction, you're in every character 'cause you can't help it.

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

A character takes shape in the act of writing. You start with something, and you add or subtract.

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

I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think happens in a child's mind, without him even knowing he has aspirations as a writer.