Quotes About Characters

I think at some level, it's just alchemy that we, as writers, can't explain when we write the characters. I don't set out to create the characters - they're not, to me, collections of quirks that I can put together. I discover the characters, instead. I usually go through a standard set of interview questions with the character in the beginning and ask the vital stuff: What's important to you? What do you love? Hate? Fear? .. and then I know where to start. But the characters just grow on their own, at a certain point. And start surprising me.

But actually making pictures to look like my pictures, I've done it for so long, I'm kind of used to it now. So at the beginning of the process, designing and storyboarding everything, I sort of did all that. And then designed the characters, and doing the textures for the characters, and the texture maps to cover all the animated characters and the sets, I did those, because that's where my sort of coloring and textures get imprinted on the film.

I had played many gay characters before, but they were finite - guest characters in TV shows or characters in plays.

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.

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.

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.

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

Making a movie is about following characters and embarking on an adventure with them, seeing their reactions, and seeing what they do, having empathy for those characters, feeling for those characters, embarking on this adventure.

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.

I've never written a fiction before about real people. . . . I read everything that I could find by people who met them and tried to get some impression of them, but as always when you write fiction, even if you have completely fictitious characters, you start by thinking of what is plausible, what would they say, what would they be likely to do, what would they be likely to think. At some point, if it is every going to come to life, the characters seem to take over and start speaking themselves, and it happened with [COPENHAGEN].

For me, there is a stigma attached to playing beautiful parts. They are often empty characters whom the action happens around. I'm more drawn to characters with a complex internal life, who have a burning frustration underneath that keeps them going.

When you are drawing characters to serve a plot purpose, you tend to get flat, stereotyped, unliving characters.

I never pick a film based on the genre; I choose the characters I play. I will think it through thoroughly - whether I am the best person to play the character, able to excel in it and match with the other characters.

I think all writers are always collecting characters as we go along. Not just characters of course, we're collecting EVERYTHING. Bits and pieces of story. An interesting dynamic between people. A theme. A great character back story. A cool occupation. The look of someone's eyes. A burning ambition. Hundreds of thousands of bits of flotsam and jetsam that we stick in the back of our minds like the shelves full of buttons and ribbons and fabrics and threads and beads in a costumer's shop.

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.

Look at the Coen brothers. All their minor characters are as interesting as their protagonists. If the smaller characters are well-written, the whole world of the film becomes enriched. It's not the size of the thing, but the detail.

We're nothing if we're not loved. When you meet somebody who is more important to you than yourself, that has to be the most important thing in life, really. And I think we are all striving for it in different ways. I also believe very, very strongly that everybody is the hero/heroine of his/her own life. 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

I just want to keep finding special characters that I feel like I can bring to life and characters that are real and not superficial.

Besides being asked why I write about young characters, I am often asked how I write about young characters. How do I throw myself across the chasm of full adulthood to relive that period? I guess I don’t, really. Age is not so much a feature of your character, as the spot where you stand for a pretty fleeting time on the arc of your life.

Every actor, I don't care what they say, their roles are a lot more interesting than we are, and at the end of the day, it's still entertainment or fantasy. I think we can learn a lot from the characters we play and I find that the characters are even more noble than myself.

People think I'm thick because of the characters I play. I think I'm brighter than the characters. Well, I hope I am.

In making Achilles and Patroclus lovers, I wasn't trying to speak for all gay men, just as when I write straight characters, I don't claim to speak for all straight people. My job as an author is to give voice to these very particular characters - these two men, in this time, and in this place

In terms of characters I wish I had created - just because I haven't dealt with anything like them - I'm really impressed by characters who can endure over time, whether that be a long series run like a Harry Bosch, or a character who endures over generations and continues to please readers: Sherlock Holmes.

I can't imagine writing a book without some strong female characters, unless that was a demand of the setting. I actually tend to suspect that in real life, there have always been very strong female characters, but at certain stages of society, they've been asked to cool it.

Y'see, I get so bored so easily. I like to start with a clean slate each time. Sure, I'll have characters drop in and out of books but the main cast of characters always changes. Maybe I'm wrong but I think if had the same joe detective guy or gal, I wouldn't write them as well; I wouldn't do as good a job.

As with most of my work, I started from the abstract, from research, building an intellectual model that slowly became internalized when the characters came alive. It's fascinating what happens to the model you've so assiduously assembled when characters are allowed to run rampant: things you thought essential are broken and other things are vastly improved.

...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.

In terms of the characters, I definitely do look for somebody that I think people can learn from and I can learn from too. In one way or another, by the fact that they are a role or by that fact that they aren't a role model. I feel like I was attracted to the past few characters that I've played, because they have an element that really touched my heart.

My whole theory about why I couldn’t find any creators who realized they were leaving out female characters is because they were raised on the same ratio. I just heard someone the other day call it either ‘smurfing’ a movie, which is when there’s one female character, or ‘minioning’ a movie, which is when there’s no female characters.

Being an author means, almost by definition, that you make up characters and then complicate their lives. That's it, really. You make up characters and give them problem after problem after problem.

Revision has its own peculiar pleasures and its own peculiar frustrations. The ground rules are already established; the characters already exist. You don't have to bring the characters to life, but you do have to make them more convincing.

It's hard to know whether certain characters come to life or not, they either come to have their own life or they don't. I've written many things in which the characters just remain inert.

One of the things that bugs me about the Western Literary Tradition is that the conventions of narrative in particular seem to confine the stories you can tell about characters to tropes of bone-headed action and old models of psychological realism. And as readers, too, we have been conditioned to understand characters as - and forgive me for saying it out loud - what the market says they should be. Namely, safe, clean, proper.

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

I love playing different characters. I just do. I want to play even more quirky and interesting characters and just something that people wouldn't automatically think that I would be. I want to go against the grain a bit and I'm hoping people will be open-minded enough to cast me in stuff that's going against the grain.

Fitzgerald describes the social disillusionments and ballroom romanticism of the young people of the upper classes and the loneliness of Gatsby, who gives large parties and has an extensive social life; yet he is lonely, and his guests scarcely know him.... Hemingway's characters live in a tourist world, and one of their major problems is that of consuming time itself. It is interesting to observe that his works are written from the stand point of the spectator. His characters are usually people who are looking--looking at bullfights, scenery, and at one another across cafe tables.

I think characters are most terrifying when they're relatable. It's best when your most horrible characters make sense, and are believable. That's when a movie is most terrifying.

Dialogue is the ideal means of showing what is between the characters. It crystallizes relationships. It should, ideally, be so effective as to make analysis or explanation of the relationships between the characters unnecessary.

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.

I think the superhero platform gives the female character, you know, a relate-ability for the male audience as well. So, I think that's why people are kinda gravitating towards female super hero characters, and also female characters in general as big parts of the film. So, that's great for us, female actors who want to do roles like that, which is really great.

When you're directing an ongoing series, the tone has already been set. So a director will come in and fulfill that tone - reinforce the characters and their behavior. The challenge is to find unique ways that you can visually tell the story while keeping the established tone and the pace and the characters.

I always try to get as personal as I can with the characters that I play, which is a reason why I don't play a lot of characters.

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.

Good people can do terrible things, and that's what life is all about, the complexities and grey areas. And often characters aren't written that way in movies, especially characters for women. So you end up being either one thing or the other.

Now we really like to put people in boxes. As men, we do it because we don't understand characters that aren't ourselves and we aren't willing to put ourselves in the skin of those characters and women, I think, terrify us. We tend not to write women as human beings. It's cartoons we're making now. And that's a shame.

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.