Quotes About Characters

What interests Sam Mendes are characters and relationships, and he was a genius at giving you the freedom to create the type of character you want, and also to explore and have fun with your fellow actors. For him, characters and relationships are really the heartbeat of the film, and then the action is the backdrop. By developing the characters, he makes you care that much more about the action and going on a journey with the characters.

One of the keys is, and it may sound funny, talking about characters with super powers, but one of the keys is to make your characters as realistic and believable as possible. Even if they have super powers, you say to yourself, "Well, if somebody had a super power like this, what would his life be like? Wouldn't he still maybe have to go to the dentist or wouldn't he have to worry about making a living? What about his love life?" You've got to make characters that your reader can believe exists or might exist.

What's actually amazing is that, after a couple of years of living with characters and writing characters and talking about characters, as we sit in the writers room and break episodes, it strikes you, every once in awhile, that you're talking about a character that's played by the same actor, who you've been talking about forever. We talk about a character dying, so you get emotional, and then you realize, "Oh, but wait, that actor is still on the show."

I look at all of world mythology and folklore as my toy to play with. There are just so many characters and creatures there I want to put on paper. It's a really exciting thing for me to take material that I really love and put a new coat of paint on it and present it to this audience. And I don't have to make up any of the characters. I can just pull a book of mythology off the shelf and say, "I'll use this guy." I also hate making up names for fantasy characters. I'll just flip through these books and say, "Wow, this is way crazier than anything I could make up".

When you start writing, you have your characters on a metaphorical paved road, and as they go down it, all these other roads become available that they can go down. And a lot of writers have roadblocks in front of those roads: they won’t allow their characters to go down those roads... I’ve never put any roadblocks on any of these paths. My characters can go wherever they would naturally go, and I’ll follow them.

I love characters that are going through turmoil. To be honest, I love characters with conflict. I love characters who are really going through an emotional journey; whether it's a super-dark-crazy journey or a really relatable guy.

There's a remarkable amount of sexism on TV. When male characters are flawed, they're interesting, deep and complex. But when female characters are flawed, they're just a mess. It's good to put more flawed but interesting female characters out there because it promotes equality.

Since I knew I was going to make a film that was purely about emotions, and I knew that I ran the risk of being accused of amnesia relating to the social film, to prevent this I decided it would be good to have characters who were on the margins of society. These are characters for whom love is really the only way to know that they're alive.

Who on earth is going to use 'utilize' in a text message, a whopping seven characters including the always-hard-to-type 'z,' when you can say the exact same thing in three characters? I can't think of a sentence in which 'use' can't replace 'utilize.'

I feel like if you aren't honest and if you don't let go and ease up off of the narrator, then the story doesn't take up a life of its own, and the characters can't take up a life of their own. You handicap the story when you try to protect your characters.

Really good acting is not about dialogue. It's really just about small moments that really make the whole entire scene and the intention completely different than even maybe what the characters are saying. Two characters could be saying, "I hate you, and I don't want to be with you anymore!" But yet somehow, their toes are just inching more, you know, closer to each other. So a really big thing about acting is really just with your body.

Try to get your characters into interesting trouble. Allow your characters to misbehave. Let them stay out after 11.

Damita Jo. Jo. That's my middle name. It's let in about the different characters that live within me. They say we have 200 characters that we portray with different people.

Ultimately, any character you write - no matter how fantastic or alien - is an extension of yourself. When our characters reflect the truth of our souls and psyches, they become real and compelling. The wonderful paradox is that the characters then take on lives of their own, separate from their creators. That's where the magic comes in.

Creating characters is like throwing together ingredients for a recipe. I take characteristics I like and dislike in real people I know, or know of, and use them to embellish and define characters.

Certainly, I look for different characters 'cause I always like to keep people guessing, and I also don't like to get typecast. I made a concerted effort, last year and this year, to get a range of characters, just to show people the range that I have, and for them to be able to see the artistry beyond the color.

The interesting thing about a lot of serialized television is that it's a blessing and curse. Smart writers really take their time in investing in backstories and characters. As a viewer, you have to invest in them and love them before you can chip away at what's going on more on a deeper level with secondary characters.

I've made the decision to adhere to three general truths when it comes to my novels: There will be a love-story element to the story, the novel will be set in eastern North Carolina, and the characters will be likeable. Then, I make each novel unique through differences in voice, perspective, age and personalities of the characters, and of course, plot.

I enjoy playing a quintessential antihero. There's something therapeutic about playing such characters. I know it sounds corny but I feel like I learn about myself when I play that characters.

As an audience member, I live vicariously through the characters I watch or read about. There's something very relatable about comic-book characters. They're never perfect. They're flawed people put in extraordinary circumstances.

I think having funny characters is just one way of having three-dimensional characters.

I always start with characters rather than with a plot, which many critics would say is very obvious from the lack of plot in my films - although I think they do have plots - but the plot is not of primary importance to me, the characters are.

The type of acting that I'm interested in, that I aspire to, is where I try and drag a lot of myself into whatever character it is. They can be very different types of characters, but at the heart of it, I always wanted to be a very, very believable and rooted in reality. One of the ways of doing that is to root it as much as you can in your own experiences and then tint those with different hues, different colors to give the different characters their way.

I want to try not to repeat myself. But then I seem to do it continuously in my films. It's not something I make any effort to do. I just want to make films that are personal, but interesting to an audience. I feel I get criticized for style over substance, and for details that get in the way of the characters. But every decision I make is how to bring those characters forward.

Mostly the natural landscapes work as a sounding board for my characters, so they can understand themselves, and it acts as a mirror in which we readers see ourselves. The natural world is the place into which all my characters have to situate themselves in order to be who they really are, and that makes my rural fiction feel different from a lot of urban fiction.

I think all great comedies - or at least the comedies I like - it has some of the funniest moments, but it never breaks the spell for the audience. It never pushes the audience away by spoofing itself too much or undermining the characters or making them cardboard or flimsy. Everybody is really trying to do what their characters believe in - and so nobody breaks the spell of the world, even though in other ways it's a comedy and very funny.

I just think of interesting roles to play. I guess that I have matured, I guess growing up and becoming a man, your taste in characters changes and I think I have become more interested in active characters as I have become less contemplative in my personal life. Things have become a little bit more interesting in the doing these days and less interesting in the thinking about the doing.

There's a certain amount of pressure that goes with writing superhero characters, especially characters that are beloved to audiences. You know that you're always writing into a certain amount of expectations and into an existing fandom, and I try to take the pressure of that in when I first accept a project and then I try to push it aside as much as possible and just focus on the story that I want to tell. It's definitely a little more pressure than writing something of your own, from your own brain, and creating those expectations from scratch. But I also like the challenge of it.

We [me and Jennifer Salke] talked about the characters and different kinds of families and where are we today. We certainly pitched the gay couple, but we also talked about what it was like to be a single mother with a young daughter, what is it like to be a woman in your 50's who is completely starting over and dating again and having to go online to date again. We talked about the whole spectrum of the characters, but I don't think it ever came up about whether people are ready for it or not.

Normally, when youre working on something, there are other characters that you have alliances with, and you have unified goals with some characters.

Characters make their own plot. The dimensions of the characters determine the action of the novel.

I like straightforward names for my characters. When I get too symbolic with names or places, I start feeling like the characters and the story are less read, and I lose interest.

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.".

For me, there's a bad year of getting started on something. You write bad stuff and it's awkward to throw it out, and you wait around to get some good ideas that maybe do come or don't come. Until eventually you get the voice and autonomy of the characters, the characters have personality, and they sort of pick up the weight and put it on their shoulders. That's when it becomes a little more fun.

For any artistic person who creates imaginary people, the art is like inhabiting the life and mind of a seven-year-old child with imaginary friends and imaginary events and imaginary grace and imaginary tragedy. Within that alternate universe, the characters do have quite a bit of free will. I know it's happening in my mind and my mind alone, but they seem to have their own ability to shape their destinies. So I'm not shooting for anything. If the characters are vulnerable it's simply because they're very human.

One never knows enough about characters in real life to put them into novels. One gets started and then, suddenly, one can not remember what toothpaste they use; what are their views on interior decoration, and one is stuck utterly. No, major characters emerge; minor ones may be photographed.

The collection is a labor of love and devotion, and whenever I found free time from my journalism work, I'd work on one story or another, or at least sketch out my characters, and research various issues related to my characters' dilemmas.

I've wondered, though, if one of the reasons we fail to acknowledge the brilliance of life is because we don't want the responsibility inherent in the acknowledgment. We don't want to be characters in a story because characters have to move and breathe and face conflict with courage. And if life isn't remarkable, then we don't have to do any of that; we can be unwilling victims instead of grateful participants.

I've often tried to imagine my dream role and what that would truly mean. I'm not sure I've reached a clear picture of it yet, but I have always said the reason I wanted to act was ultimately to develop characters that evoke emotion and consequently change lives.

Characters for me are born on page one and they die on page 100.

Number one rule for fiction: Coincidence can be used to worsen a characters predicament, but never to solve his problems.

I want to be inspired by the characters that I play and excited by the projects that I do.

But it's hard for me to pinpoint where all my characters and dialogue come from - imagination or real life. My memoir, of course, was all about my past, and many of the short stories cleave very closely to my life, but the more stories I wrote in the collection, the more that seemed to be invented, but who knows... I think I'm writing about a young woman with acne who shoplifts, but I'm really writing about myself.

I haven't personally in my real life had many people close to me die, but my characters have, and I've had to live that as though it's real. And it can take a really big emotional toll on someone.

Even happy situations can easily start to feel miserable. So, I think that people who consider themselves sophisticated or who are in fact sophisticated have come to distrust stories that are uplifting or simply stories in which the characters get what they want in the end. Because in life, what you want is never the end.

I try to have a balance of things you like and things you don't like about a character. But once you start that, all these scripts are like, "You play the douchebag friend of Ashton Kutcher." It's all these characters that are overconfident or hyper-masculine.

Russian directors, we are shooting the same streets. The same things. Tom Jacobson has a fresh eye and found very interesting and very cool locations and angles and characters.

I definitely acknowledge that The Matrix and Trinity had an influence on female action-oriented characters in television and in film. I think it's awesome.