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You can be true to the character all you want but you've got to go home with yourself.

The thing is, even if you're playing sort of a heightened character and playing inside sort of a heightened reality, you can still apply your own truths to those characters.

To me, my characters are more real than most people I meet.

My characters are fictional. I get ideas from real people, sometimes, but my characters always exist only in my head.

Every character I play has to be the hero of his own story, the way we're all heroes of our own lives.

My role is to just tell the highest degree of truth with every character and every story. From there, I have no clue whatsoever how things are going to turn out.

I'm not in the business of meddling with people's destinies - and yes, my characters are real people to me. They have histories and thoughts and yearnings and hurts and misgivings and pleasures that don't belong to me.

I get very involved in my characters. Sometimes I have a very hard time separating my characters from my life.

I treat all my characters as if they were real, and I am scrupulous about the details of their lives.

I'll write about myself, or people I know, or archetypal characters, but the goal is to get at some truth, not to necessarily convey my own experience as an individual to the world.