Emma Healey Quotes

I do want to write about Jane Whitefield again, but only when I have a good enough idea - something I've figured out about her that's news and that's worth a reader's time.

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.

Characters are the key to a good book. It took me several novels to comprehend that.

What I like to write about is stuff I know. I don't think I could write a novel. I don't think I have it in me to come up with those kinds of characters.

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.

The writer of stories or of novels settles on men and imitates them; he exhausts the possibilities of his characters.

People are always thinking that I'm the main character in my books, but each one has been different, and sometimes they've been men.

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

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

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

I have tried very hard as a novelist to say, 'Novels are about individuals and especially larger than life individuals.'

I love all the characters I write.

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

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

I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people.

You spend so much time writing a character the way I did with Buddy Baker and then Green Arrow that you start to care about them. And you almost think of them as people, you know?

All the writing elements are the same. You need to tell a good story... You've got good characters... People think there's some dramatic difference between writing 'Little Bear' and the 'Hunger Games,' and as a writer, for me, there isn't.

Whichever character I'm using and wherever I am in my mind dictates what kind of story I'm going to tell.

At the end of the day, it's really, really difficult to make a brand-new show, to write a pilot where you have to introduce characters and everyone has to kind of be dynamic and have something different for themselves.

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.

Since I grew up, I have never deliberately used any technique at all other than the physical shaping of my tale so that it more or less resembles what has been thought of as a novel for these last two hundred years.

I normally write in the first person, and my narrators are as real to me as any of the people I have worked with. They live and breathe in my imagination.

I have to have a character worth caring about. I tend not to start writing books about people I don't have a lot of sympathy for because I'm just going to be with them too long.

While writing a novel, I don't read anything new in fiction. I am too engrossed.

I enjoy the writing process and producing; I enjoy seeing an idea come to fruition. I'm driven by very complex characters. You look at the pilot of 'Breaking Bad,' where there's so much depth to the character, you can't help but be invested when you watch.