Quotes About Characters

Gettting to know your characters is so much more important than plotting. Working out every detail of your story in advance, especially when you don't yet know your main characters, always seems a little too much like playing God. You're working out your characters' lives, their destiny, before they've had a chance to discover who they are and what kind of people they want to be.

I like complex characters. I've been very, very lucky to portray, in these past three years, characters that are strong and fragile at the same time. It's those characters that I'm looking for. In the last year and half I played three different religions, and that allowed me to educate myself so much.

Part of the success of the show is that the audience sees themselves in the characters, becomes the characters. The more they inhabit the characters, the more they see

It helps to regard soul as an active intelligence, forming and plotting each person's fate. Translators use "plot" to render the ancient Greek word mythos in English. The plots that entangle our souls and draw forth our characters are the great myths. That is why we need a sense of myth and knowledge of different myths to gain insight into our epic struggles, our misalliances, and our tragedies. Myths show the imaginative structures inside our messes, and our human characters can locate themselves against the background of the characters of myth.

To my way of thinking, whether it's a superhero movie or a romance or a comedy or whatever, the most important thing is you've got to care about the characters. You've got to understand the characters and you've got to be interested. If the characters are interesting, you're half-way home.

I like characters. I like spirited characters whether they exist in fiction or real life. Whether they're the invention of artistic people or directors, musicians. I think music and art and fashion designers inspire me and I like characters.

I feel my characters are valid, my characters are people, my characters have hope. Hope is the thing that'll take us through.

One of the things when you write, well the way I write, is that you are writing your scenario and there are different roads that become available that the characters could go down. Screenwriters will have a habit of putting road blocks up against some of those roads because basically they can't afford to have their characters go down there because they think they are writing a movie or trying to sell a script or something like that. I have never put that kind of imposition on my characters. Wherever they go I follow.

I don't want to know about the lives of other actors and I don't want people to know too much about me. If we don't know about the private lives of other actors, that leaves us as clean slates when it comes to playing characters. That's the point, they can create these other characters and I can believe them. I think if you're a good enough actor, that's the way to longevity in the film business. Keep everybody guessing.

I immediately noticed there were far more male characters than female characters in the programs, even now, in the 21st century.

I don't think I ever relinquish a person I have known, and surely not my fictional characters. I see them, I hear them, with a clarity that I would call hallucinatory if hallucination didn't mean something else ... A character whom we create can never die, any more than a friend can die ... Through [my characters] I've lived many parallel lives.

There are certain artists and filmmakers who, I get the impression, are trying to show off how bad their characters can be, how immoral their characters can be.

Eve Byron has a permanent place on my must-buy list. Her characters are three-dimensional men and women who live on in readers' hearts long after they've turned the last page. ONLY IN MY DREAMS is pure Eve Byron, which means it's a pure delight. I fell in love with Lorelei and Dane, two of the most delightful characters I've encountered in a very long time. Byron's magical touch never falters. ONLY IN MY DREAMS is a surefire hit!

I like being in real environments. I love being in the place that it's about - these sets and locations are characters in the movies. Can you imagine Breakfast at Tiffany's shot somewhere else? It's classic. Characters are part of storytelling; they're just as important as everything else.

I don't really pity any of my characters. I hold my characters under a harsh fluorescent lamp and ask "Who are you?" I'm not doing their makeup or giving them hairdos. They present themselves to me as they are and then I let them say what they want. Usually they're saying something too honest.

The best morals kids get from any book is just the capacity to empathize with other people, to care about the characters and their feelings. So you don't have to write a preachy book to do that. You just have to make it a fun book with characters they care about, and they will become better people as a result.

I know that shorter messages are better in terms of reply rate. The optimal length is something like 50 characters. Characters, not words.

The great thing about acting is, because you're constantly playing other characters and exploring yourself because you have to find those other characters in yourself, you sort of broaden as a person over your life because you've been other people. So you can empathize with many different sorts of people. It's great in that way and I hope, therefore, as you get older as an actor, you not only get more interesting because you lived more, but you get a bit wiser as a person.

You definitely do not do films for that particular reason. You do them for yourself, for your satisfaction of creating this thing with characters and watching these characters take on real life - that's all you care about.

Nice characters are boring! I like writing upbeat characters - that's my natural tendency.

I rarely return to characters. My characters, at least most of them, are much more a part of that superorganism that is the story than separate and independent creatures.

First comes an idea. Then, characters begin to evolve out of the landscape of that idea. And then, finally, characters dominate: plot is simply a function of what these people might do or be. Everything has to flow from their personalities; otherwise it will not be emotionally engaging, or plausible.

Normally, filmmakers would just write a script and cast people to act as certain characters in the story. But in my way of doing things, I have the actors in my mind already, so I'm trying to borrow something that's unique to them. The characters have a very natural connection to the actors themselves.

I've had people who see all my characters as Native, even if they aren't. It's kind of like assuming all a writer's characters are really female because the writer is a woman. I've learned to let that go.

Chairman Mao not only introduced Pinyin in China, but also simplified half the Chinese characters, believing that fewer strokes would enable more people to learn to write the characters.

That's a long way of saying no, I'm always too bound up in thinking about the characters in whatever I'm working on and trying to make good to dwell on characters from previous books.

You must create the character's internal life. What do I mean by internal life? I mean the thoughts, feelings, memories, and inner decisions that may not be spoken. When we look into the eyes of actors giving fully realized performances, we can see them thinking. We're interested in what they're experiencing that may never be spoken, that quality of nonverbal expression - which is as much a part of the characters as breathing and as real as what they say and do. This is their internal life. It helps us believe in the characters and care about them.

I've worked with a lot of characters that are unhinged. I've played characters that are unhinged. That's, like, my job.

There's nothing comparative to Damien [the current Robin] or any of the other characters. I love those characters. And this isn't, "This is better than that." I think a couple of people misread what we had said in the first issue about that stuff.

I really do believe that people surprise you. And one of the powerful things about novels is that they're about characters, and those characters live their lives.

I remember how surprised I was when my first novel was about to be published and I was informed that I could be sued for anything any one of my characters said. 'But I often don't agree with what they say,' I protested. The lawyer was not interested in the clear distinction I make between my own voice and the voices of my characters. Neither, I have found, are many of my readers.

I have this theory that the likeability question comes up so much more with female characters created by female authors than it does with male characters and male authors

The best characters are the ones that somehow manage to be both attractive and repulsive at the same time. If you do that, you're at the center of the universe - if you can find characters who are more ambiguous and can raise more questions than answers.

You are going to love some of your characters because they are you or some facet of you, and you are going to hate some of your characters for the same reason.

There is no obligation for the author of a film to believe in, or to sympathise with, the moral behaviour of his characters. Nor is he necessarily to be accredited with the same opinions as his characters. Nor is it necessary or obligatory for him to believe in the tenet of his construction - all of which is a disclaimer to the notion that the author of Drowning by Numbers believes that all men are weak, enfeebled, loutish, boorish and generally inadequate and incompetent as partners for women. But it's a thought.

The way I see the job, my definition of it, is to create characters to the best of your ability and then fit into what's trying to be accomplished in the general framework of the film. I think that's whether you're doing this- even if you're doing musical theater. That's what I think an actors job is. I don't know. I like to think what an actors job is is to create characters.

I'm drawn to real-life characters. A lot of the characters I play, I've had in me since second grade. I've been dragging them around my entire life, and then sometimes I marry them with different people. But seldom have I really come up with a new character. In my head it's like, "I'll pull that person out that I've been doing since sixth grade and see where they're at right now.".

I don't see a difference between playing a performance capture role and a live action role, they're just characters to me at the end of the day and I'm an actor who wants to explore those characters in fantastically written scripts. The only caveat is a good story is a good character.

What I do is give Ennio Morricone suggestions and describe to him my characters, and then, quite often, he'll possibly write five themes for one character. And five themes for another. And then I'll take one piece of one of them and put it with a piece of another one for that character or take another theme from another character and move it into this character.... And when I have my characters finally dressed, then he composes.

Russell Hoban created a tremendous marriage of characters and philosophy. The plots, the wind-up toy characters, the settings, they all work together to support basically a dark vision that the world is kind of a dump. And we all have to find our ways of surviving in it and of making it a better place. It's a world where we don't have much help, other than what we bring to the table. It's a world in which brotherly love counts more than anything else.

I've always preferred writing about grey characters and human characters. Whether they are giants or elves or dwarves, or whatever they are, they're still human, and the human heart is still in conflict with the self.

My role in 'Legally Blonde' was really rewarding, because I had so much fun working on the movie. I've had really rewarding experiences on tiny low budget films that you'll never see but where I had a cool time creating characters as well. I love almost all of the characters I've played.

I never really thought about what characters I play. I always just wanted different characters.

Compared with men, it is probable that brutes neither attend to abstract characters, nor have associations by similarity. Their thoughts probably pass from one concrete object to its habitual concrete successor far more uniformly than is the case with us. In other words, their associations of ideas are almost exclusively by contiguity. So far, however, as any brute might think by abstract characters instead of by association of con cretes, he would have to be admitted to be a reasoner in the true human sense. How far this may take place is quite uncertain.

For the camera, I like the feeling of changing into different characters. Even though I'm not acting, I still have to be someone different to show the product. If I'm not being someone different, I won't find it fun. I love the shows because it transforms you into a different person. Not Malaika - it makes me someone else. Naturally, I'm quiet and crazy. But when they give me an outfit, like a very elegant outfit, it transforms me into this beautiful woman - I can feel it inside me. I like that, playing different characters. I'm really interested in acting.

Third person allows a deeper exploration of the relationships between characters. We can see their misunderstandings and hear what they think about each other. We can create a more complex structure with various story threads running parallel.

I don't have to prove anything to anyone. As a result, I am ready to take up again the characters who are closer to what I really am.

I'm a massive daydreamer. I'm constantly lost within my own fantasies and my own thoughts personally, and I think maybe that is sort of represented in what we do for a living, the fact that we make believe everything and we escape into these other characters for a living.