A Quote by Thomas Steinbeck

The characters in my stories, whether historical or fictional, usually prove to be a compilation of influences taken from differing sources, but never drawn from one model.

Thomas Steinbeck

Quote Topics

Characters Compilation Drawn Fictional Historical Influences Model Never Prove Sources Stories Taken Whether

Quote Author

Thomas Steinbeck
American - Novelist
August 2, 1944 - August 11, 2016

I've always been drawn to writing historical characters. The best stories are the ones you find in history.

Tony Kushner

I like going back in time and writing historical fantasy. I use some real historical characters as a background to give depth to the fantasy. And I throw my fictional characters into the midst of this, and, so far, it has turned out interesting.

Judith Tarr

Writing historical novels can be dangerous. We need to be as accurate and as fair about the historical record as we can be, at the same time as creating our fictional characters and, hopefully, telling a good story. The challenge is weaving the fiction into the history.

Edward Rutherfurd

I find that you're drawn to certain stories, and there's something about fairytales that have deep roots. They connect really deeply to you, and those are the stories that I find myself drawn to. I love characters that believe the impossible is possible.

Glen Keane

When you're training as an actor, a lot of the big work you're learning is to treat fictional characters like real people. You don't have the problem of discovering a backstory with real people, but there's always a mystery which is common to both fictional and factual characters. They are never quite the person you think they are.

Toby Jones

As soon as I started reading, I found myself drawn to fictional character's homes as much as I was to the characters themselves.

Mary Kay Andrews

I think you can learn a lot from primary sources. 'The Penguin Book of Witches,' which is edited by novelist Katherine Howe, is a wonderful compilation of primary sources about witchcraft.

Deborah Harkness

I think the most appealing characters for the audience are the ones that you never know whether to root for them or whether to hate them. That's what keeps people drawn to their television sets.

Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje

The world is full of fictional characters looking for their stories

Diane Arbus

What writers of fantasy, science fiction, and much historical fiction do for a living is different from what writers of so-called literary or other kinds of fiction do. The name of the game in F/SF/HF is creating fictional worlds and then telling particular stories set in those worlds. If you're doing it right, then the reader, coming to the end of the story, will say, "Hey, wait a minute, there are so many other stories that could be told in this universe!" And that's how we get the sprawling, coherent fictional universes that fandom is all about.

Neal Stephenson

I never imagined people like Thanos and Warlock would be drawn into films. They're weird characters in weird stories. Luckily, the twisted kids who read those weird stories are now the twisted adults who are making movies.

Jim Starlin

In terms of a narrative nonfiction book, when you're describing scenes that you have multiple sources for, and that you have differing sources for, and you decide to choose a path that puts all that information together, well yeah, there's definitely going to be a little bit of the author in that. But there's nothing wrong with that.

Ben Mezrich

Some of my characters are drawn from people I know whereas others are an amalgamation of people or one specific person. Sometimes a character is simply fictional. It is always a mix.

Zoya Akhtar

Mostly, I'm drawn to great characters and great worlds that use weird things for their language - whether it's dance, whether it's pop music with Justin Bieber, or whether it's magic.