Aging & Wisdom Quote by Jonathan Kellerman

There is a quiet sleight of hand in Kellerman's phrasing: he presents fictional characters not as inventions but as presences with their own momentum. "These people are real to me" is less a claim about delusion than a working method, the novelist's version of a clinician's disciplined empathy. As a psychologist, Kellerman is trained to treat interior lives as coherent, consequential systems; the line reads like an ethical stance as much as a creative one. If you take people seriously, they start to act like people. They surprise you, recur, insist.

The second sentence - "situations keep coming up where their emergence feels natural" - hints at the real engine of series fiction: not plot as spectacle, but plot as a continuous social world. Characters don't get dragged onstage because the author needs a twist; they "emerge" because the world has been built densely enough to generate its own collisions. That's the subtext: craft masquerading as inevitability. He wants the return of a character to feel like causality, not fan service.

"Like meeting old friends" is a sentimental metaphor, but it's also transactional. Kellerman is describing reader retention without saying "brand loyalty". He understands that long-running mysteries are powered by companionship as much as suspense: the comfort of recognition paired with the slight dread of what might happen next. The final hope - that readers "feel the same way" - is an invitation into shared intimacy, a pact that the author will keep treating these "people" as real if the audience agrees to keep showing up.