A Quote by Robert Holdstock

All characters are based on elements of a writer's personal experience.

Robert Holdstock

Quote Topics

Based Characters Elements Experience Personal Personal Experience Writer

Quote Author

Robert Holdstock
English - Novelist
August 2, 1948 - November 29, 2009

I think all of my songs are either based on personal experience or will be based on personal experience, because I do write a lot of songs prophetically.

Jens Lekman

I've always written stuff based on personal experience, but I've always disguised it by the use of characters.

Sune Rose Wagner

A writer has to stand outside the page. It's not for the writer to shed tears onto the pages for these characters. It's not for him to suffer or to laugh or to experience ecstasy or agony in the manner of the characters on the pages.

Richard Flanagan

I write characters that are based on elements of people I know and experiences I've really had.

Aziz Ansari

The theme of the diary is always the personal, but it does not mean only a personal story: it means a personal relationship to all things and people. The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic; I never generalize, intellectualise. I see, I hear, I feel. These are my primitive elements of discovery. Music, dance, poetry and painting are the channels for emotion. It is through them that experience penetrates our bloodstream.

Anais Nin

I find it interesting that authors of fantasy and science fiction novels are rarely asked if their books are based on their personal experiences, because all writing is based on personal experience. I may not have gone on an epic quest through a haunted forest, but the feelings in my books are often based on feelings I've had. Real-life events, in fantasy and science fiction, can take on metaphorical significance that they can't in a so-called realistic novel.

Malinda Lo

Mysteries always have the potential for interesting connections between the elements. I'm also most interested in the relationship between the characters. As in 'Masterpiece,' I'm trying to create characters who not only are solving a mystery but are solving the riddle of their own personal relationships.

Elise Broach

Action, reaction, motivation, emotion, all have to come from the characters. Writing a love scene requires the same elements from the writer as any other.

Nora Roberts

I've had people who see all my characters as Native, even if they aren't. It's kind of like assuming all a writer's characters are really female because the writer is a woman. I've learned to let that go.

Eden Robinson

In our culture, imitation-based experience dominates reality-based experience. I find this an awful thing. But there are artists who know from the bottom of their souls that art is about the experience of reality. The reason we have art is because you can’t get a real experience from the world.

Richard Tuttle

I would not describe myself as a political writer except in the sense that the personal is political, which is something that I do strongly believe. And in that sense American Gods is a very personal novel and a political novel. I was trying to describe the experience of coming to America as an immigrant, the experience of watching the way that America tends to eat other cultures.

Neil Gaiman

Even in modern art, artists have used methods based on calculation, inasmuch as these elements, alongside those of a more personal and emotional nature, give balance and harmony to any work of art.

Max Bill

I'VE NOTICED, FROM MY EXPERIENCE, IF THE EXTERNAL, EMOTIONAL CONSTRUCTION OF IMAGES IN A FILM ARE BASED ON THE FILMMAKER'S OWN MEMORY, ON THE KINSHIP OF ONE'S PERSONAL EXPERIENCE WITH THE FABRIC OF THE FILM, THEN THE FILM WILL HAVE THE POWER TO AFFECT THOSE WHO SEE IT.