“Fictional characters soon take on a life of their own. They run with the bit between their teeth.”

“If you fictionalized my character, I could live a bit longer.”

“Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.”

“You can have a very intense relationship with fictional characters because they are in your own head.”

“I quote fictional characters, because I'm a fictional character myself!”

“I'd said to them that when we read fiction, we pour our own paricular store of emotions - say, the sense of loss we feel for those disappeared from our lives - into the characters set before us. We take the few words with which the writer sketches these characters, the thing he said, the pain she felt, where they were, and our own emotional stockpile magically creates people. As the human eye fleshes out the pixilated image. Fictional characters are highly sophiticated Rorschach blots, and we, along with their author, are their authors. When you read a fictional character, you too are creating her.”