Quotes About Characters

So the fact that there's someone who's planning what happens to the characters, writing it down, means that the characters always have a fate. And when we think about fate, we tend think of it as the thing we would have if we were literary characters, that is, if there were somebody out there, writing us.

The supporting characters typically carry less story/plot weight - so you can be more broad and pushed with them. Supporting characters also take up less of the film's screen time. A short is a great opportunity for supporting characters to shine.

Office of itself does much to equalize politicians. It by no means brings all characters to a level; but it does bring high characters down and low characters up towards a common standard.

To be honest, I don't think of any of my characters as minor characters - they're all the main characters in a story that I don't necessarily get to tell.

People come, people go – they’ll drift in and out of your life, almost like characters in a favorite book. When you finally close the cover, the characters have told their story and you start up again with another book, complete with new characters and adventures. Then you find yourself focusing on the new ones, not the ones from the past.

My attitudes aren't directed toward characters at all. I don't feel sympathetic toward some characters, unsympathetic toward others. I don't love some characters, feel contempt for others. They have attitudes; I don't.

Everything I make is with intention. I'm not very haphazard with my artist work, although I wish I was sometimes. I'm very conscious of the conversations I'm pushing about different threads and themes around landscape and characters that exist - how it's pictured, who's pictured it, who's owned it and who's been able to inhabit certain spaces. I have other interests as well. I'm really obsessed now with going to gay male dance clubs. I find those thrilling. I'm interested in what future characters can come.

You can make low-budget film as long as there is something compelling about the characters. There is a believability in the chemistry and a likeability amongst the characters.

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.

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.

When you build characters from the outside in, they become, oftentimes they become like 'Saturday Night Live' characters or they become like caricatures of the character.

I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story.

People say that they like the characters that they believe that I am. But, I don't as much. I like the characters that I believe that I am not. Like my role on 'Law and Order.' That character unnerved people. And I loved every second of it. I want to continue growing as an actress. There are ways that I can reach quicker, or deeper, with acting.

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.

None of the male characters are as powerful or as interesting as the four central female characters. The men work best as representations of the current stage of a particular female’s psyche. The men function as catalysts, and are certainly important to the development of the story, but the relationships are not the goal. I do not see romance as being what’s central to the success of PRETTY LITTLE LIARS.

People say that to me and I think what unites all my characters is that they are hurt; it's most accurate to say I play characters that are hurt but are responding to their environment.

There are twenty-four characters in this book named Max. Let there be an end to this silly business of authors never giving their own names to characters in their novels. False modesty, faugh!

...It's all sort of dreams and it's all illusion. It's theater; it's not real. We're making up stories, you know, and people tend to run into you and believe you are your characters. And I suppose the funny thing is the longer you go, you do become sort of some version of [your characters]. You both diverge from them - you know - you live, but you also permanently inhabit that geography and that mental space - and so you do morph a little bit. We do become what we imagine.

I get very involved in my characters. Sometimes I have a very hard time separating my characters from my life.

The first act of insight is throw away the labels. In fiction, while we do not necessarily write about ourselves, we write out of ourselves, using ourselves; what we learn from, what we are sensitive to, what we feel strongly about--these become our characters and go to make our plots. Characters in fiction are conceived from within, and they have, accordingly, their own interior life; they are individuals every time.

If a novel is written in a certain language with certain characters from a particular community and the story is very good or illuminating, then that work is translated into the language of another community - then they begin to see through their language that the problems described there are the same as the problems they are having. They can identify with characters from another language group.

I try to make my characters kind of ordinary, somebody that anybody could be. Because we've all had loves, perhaps love and loss, people can relate to my characters.

On the surface, Wonder Boys seemed like such a departure from L.A. Confidential - it's funny, it's contemporary, and so on - and yet at a certain point, I had a feeling that reminded me how I felt when I was shooting L.A. Confidential. I analyzed it for a while, and thought about how emotionally involved I was with the characters. Then I realized that in both movies, there are three main male characters and one female, and all of them are struggling to figure out what they're doing with their lives, independent of each other.

One thing about our show that wasn't even in my awareness, but was brought to my attention by other people, is that our show is about these love-based relationships. Even though the characters are obviously going through different conflicts, you can really feel that the characters love each other. And they really try their best.

A big part of filmmaking, and a big part of the power of filmmaking, is creating characters that people fall in love with. So, those things, like the bloopers, create more reality and dimension, and the sense that these are not drawings or shadows, but they are living, breathing, thinking characters. That's the illusion.

For me, I just like to be as fun as possible, but I do like to bring a lot to a character. Given the script or the show, I know my boundaries, limits, and how far I can go with it. As far as me choosing these characters that have a lot of personality, I don't necessarily think it's intentional. I just think that I try and come up with a backstory of who they are, depending on the script or how rounded these characters are, and just go from there.

I write easily, let's put it that way. And in a novel particularly, the characters take over. And they tell me what to say and they tell me what they're doing. And I'm a third of the way into a novel and then I just let the characters finish it for me.

I always start drawing any job by planning out to some degree the locales and trying to nail the characters. If they're existing characters, I'll draw them several times on rough paper just to get a feeling for them. The ideal when you're drawing a comic is to have everything in your head, not to have to refer to notes.

It`s always been the same for me. I`ve always enjoyed acting, and I really love good actors; they`re such unique characters. I wish I could tell stories well, or tell a joke. Any time someone can do that it`s so satisfying. Sean Penn, for instance, is a really good actor, and he can tell a good joke or story. But it`s hard to do. Most actors have special talents that make them attractive, but they`re often odd characters.

I don't try to intellectualize characters too much. But I always think of the audience. I always make sure that my characters are likeable.

When I decided to write a novel about Istanbul, I thought I should put the different faces of Istanbul into one book. I also put the characters in a cell, and it's three stories underground, rather than on the surface. The characters have one Istanbul, the other one is above ground. One is in dark, one is in light. That kind of contradiction - those opposite sides - creates a great energy in Istanbul.

I love writing about men. To get by in the world you have to know how men think. Not that all guys think alike, but women tend to think about more things at the same time, an overgeneralization, but I find it easier to make my male characters focus than I do my female characters.

Characters with no integrity are just as interesting as characters with lots of integrity.

What's cool is that in the story of the movie [The Hangover] our characters are also really kind of getting to know each other and bonding over the course of the movie. And I think you're seeing a real, a literal sort of friendship growing both in us as actors and on screen as characters.

I think that the next album is specifically for sure from Cry Baby's perspective, but it's not necessarily about her family-life or her love-life, or anything like that, it's more about this place in this town. The place has different characters in there, so in every song there's gonna be different characters that appear.

You couple that with how I looked when I was younger, and growing up... The voice is not quite breaking. It's awful. No, I don't enjoy that at all. But that's one of the things people love and find so endearing about the Harry Potter series, and why they've lasted so long. Because people have grown up with us, and they care about the characters. They're not just some characters in the film, they're people you can relate to, and you care about, and you grew up with, and when they die in this film, people feel it!

You try to make characters you care about, and I think realism helps. Even though this is a high concept, the characters have got to be real.

Characters do not change. Opinions alter, but characters are only developed.

Well, that's the great thing about indie film, in general. If it's not subject to the constraints of too much pressure from the studio or marketing, and all of that, you get to actually present fuller characters and you get to have the dark side of the characters. That's usually what gets cut out.

I've always wanted to do characters that would help me find my connection with others and connect all of us together. You always want the energy of the character, the spirit of the person, to enter you.

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 got an email from Nick [Kroll] that he and John [Mulaney] were looking to put on the stage show with two of their characters from Kroll Show and could I help at all. And they were doing it [off-Broadway] at the Cherry Lane and they had been performing it at UCB, just sort of testing it out. I worked on it for a little bit downtown and it was a great experience.

You see we adults have learned how to disguise our terrible characters but a child... well, it's like a grotesque drawing of us. They should be neither seen nor heard. And no one must make another one.

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.

I think I'm drawn to characters with complexity or who are under duress in some way and have some conflict going on.

When I was in school, I was always writing scripts and dressing up as characters. I'd constantly be that guy who'd get up on stage. I used to write imaginary TV shows, like soap operas, for fun.

Memory and the imagination are almost identical. It's the same place in the brain and the same thing is happening. When you think about your own life, there are no memories without place. You are always situated somewhere. I think the imagination - the narrative imagination at least - situates you in a specific space when you start to think of a story. I often use places I know. I put my characters inside rooms and houses that I'm familiar with - sometimes the houses of my parents or grandparents or previous apartments I've lived in.

No strict schedule, but I write nearly daily in my journal. Sometimes I go back and pull out things to give to my characters and my settings in books that I write. But the books themselves are not scheduled. I work on a book when it comes to me, usually about one a year. I spend a lot of time working on it in my head. But getting it published is another matter. So, I have a lot of unpublished manuscripts.