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

S. E. Hinton draws a clear boundary between observation and invention, asserting that while life supplies sparks, fiction is the crucible where those sparks are transformed. Real people provide textures, gestures, cadences, contradictions, but the finished character is an imagined construct, not a disguised biography. That distinction matters artistically and ethically. It frees a storyteller from the cramped box of transcription and from the gossip-minded reading that reduces novels to scavenger hunts for real-life counterparts. It affirms that the truth pursued is emotional and thematic, not documentary.

Her stance also reflects the craft of synthesis. Writers notice fragments: the way someone laughs in the dark, a lopsided loyalty, the small acts of bravado in hallways and parking lots. Those fragments mingle with memory, longing, fear, and narrative purpose until they fuse into a person who never existed yet behaves with convincing necessity. The alchemy is not additive but transformative; you cannot reverse-engineer a character back into a single original. Composites, distortions, and inventions create the illusion of autonomous life.

There is a quiet defense of artistic autonomy here. By insisting that characters live in the mind, Hinton claims the right to shape them to the demands of story rather than to fidelity to any model. That autonomy lets a character surprise even the author, developing motives and choices that feel inevitable within the fictional world. Such inevitability is what readers recognize as “real,” a reality built from coherence, vulnerability, and consequence rather than from verifiable resemblance.

Finally, the statement resists a culture eager to read novels as confession or exposure. It protects the privacy of lived experience while honoring its influence, acknowledging that art feeds on the world without feeding upon individuals. The result is a paradox central to fiction: imagined people who reveal truths that raw fact alone cannot reach.