John Fowles Quotes

I always have a rough outline, but I'm shocked at how little I actually follow it. Those characters keep doing things that I never expected. I think if I crept up to my keyboard and peeked, they'd be talking about things behind my back. Okay, that's a little paranoid and delusional... but just a little.

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.

The characters have their own lives and their own logic, and you have to act accordingly.

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.

As a writer you're holding a dog. You let the dog run about. But you finally can pull him back. Finally, I'm in control. But the great excitement is to see what happens if you let the whole thing go. And the dog or the character really runs about, bites everyone in sight, jumps up trees, falls into lakes, gets wet, and you let that happen. That's the excitement of writing plays-to allow the thing to be free but still hold the final leash.

For any artistic person who creates imaginary people, the art is like inhabiting the life and mind of a seven-year-old child with imaginary friends and imaginary events and imaginary grace and imaginary tragedy. Within that alternate universe, the characters do have quite a bit of free will. I know it's happening in my mind and my mind alone, but they seem to have their own ability to shape their destinies. So I'm not shooting for anything. If the characters are vulnerable it's simply because they're very human.

The illusion of control has to be there, but mostly I'm following characters and the consequences of their own decisions, because a lot of the time they made decisions about what to do or how to behave that I had no idea were coming down the pike. As I would sit and try to inhabit a character, they themselves in my imagination would have quite a bit of free will.

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

As an author you hope your characters have sparks but truly in the end they have minds of their own!

I think a fictional invention grows according to its own development, not the author's. Characters in fiction are not simply as alive as you and me, they are more alive. Becky Sharp, Elizabeth Bennett, and Don Quixote may not outlive the burning out of the sun, but they will certainly outlive the brief candle of our lives.

To me, writing is much freer than dancing. With writing, you could do it whenever you wanted. You didn't have to do little exercises and stay in shape. You could have great moments of inspiration that advanced the story. In dance, unless you're going to choreograph things yourself, you're at the service of someone else.

I prefer to surprise myself as I'm writing. I'm not interested in it if I already know where it's going. So I have only the most general sense of what I'm doing when I start a story. I sometimes have a destination in mind, but how the story is going to go from Point A to Point Z is something I make up as I go along.

My instinct is to absolutely recoil when talking about writing in a mechanistic way. Nothing could be dumber than writing a film or TV script based on prescriptions, on other peoples' ideas of what character should be.

Everyone who sits on a sofa watching 'Match of the Day' is a top soccer expert, as you know. So if you start to worry about such people reading your story and saying, 'That'd never happen' you're going to freeze up. You're writing fiction, and your characters can do whatever you need them to do.

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.

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

Any author of fiction will tell you that characters don't need to be told what to do.

As far as subject matter, I'd say most of the songs aren't that personal to me. I love making up characters and kind of having fun in a different kind of way.

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

I start with a character and a situation, but I don't know what's going to happen until I write it. Sometimes things happen that surprise me.

Success is freedom - scripts coming your way and getting to choose the stories you want to tell.

I really fall in love with my characters, even the bad ones. I love getting together with them. They tell me what to do; they take me on a wild and wonderful trip.

See, what I don't like listening to is when writers go, 'And then the person cries.' 'Or the person does this.' It's there, but it's not the Bible. I wait and see what happens to me on the day.

As much as I really like the screenwriting thing, the novel is where the author has so much control.

We all know that I love writing Gambit.