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Sometimes you become friends with the characters you portray.

I think the great thing about characters is the ways that they can be surprising. I mean, sometimes you think you've got a lock on a personality, even just in life, and then they'll shock you by their behavior.

The characters I'm most emotionally involved with are like friends you leave behind when you move away. You don't see them regularly anymore, but you still love them and keep in touch.

Sometimes I become attached to a character because I've gotten to explore him for so long, like in the case of Ben, but sometimes I fall in love with a throwaway character who exists for only one scene in a video game like The Drunken Villager in 'Diablo III' or Sandal in 'Dragon Age.'

Whenever people say they didn't like the main character of a book, they mean they didn't like the book. The main character has to be a friend? I don't get that.

You always take a little bit back with you at the end of the day. I always put a little bit of myself into the characters, too. You find parallels, points of connection, things like that. But I'm not an actor who gets so incredibly haunted by my characters that I can't come back.

I suppose it's possible that a writer would have feeling for his characters, but I can't see how, because writing is such a meticulous, intricate, technical business. I wish I could say that I love my characters and that frequently they take over the book and run away with the plot and so on. But they don't exist.

Sometimes you can just step into the character, and you get all your feelings and emotions just from sympathizing with her and being her. But then, other times, you just have to resort back to anything that you've been through in your own life and try to play that.