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I think every writer will tell you that their characters are always partially themselves: who I am and what I've experienced. It's always there in part of my characters.

All characters come from people I know, but after the initial inspiration, I tend to modify the characters so they fit with the story.

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.

Especially when you play a character for so many years, the character ends up reflecting a lot of who you are and I think I've changed a lot since then, but that represented a lot of who I was as a teenager.

Some characters think more like me than others; some think more like my dad or someone else. It certainly is made up of my experiences, things I've heard, things I think are funny, things I think are sad. There's sort of a strange, blurry version of yourself in there.

How I would describe my characters is absolutely different from how I would describe myself.

I think every character I've ever come up with has been based on someone or something I've known.

I think I always resented the fact that people thought I was trying to entertain them with my multifaceted, chameleonlike character changes. Although I liked doing that, I wasn't out to fool people and say 'Guess which one is me.'