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.

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.

I think it's interesting playing characters who are flawed and make mistakes because we all have - no one's just one thing - no one is just bad or just good - so I like finding flawed characters and playing with their redeeming qualities, whether you play it outwardly or not. I think that one of the reasons I'm an actor is that I love people and I love finding out who they are and why they do the things they do, so it is fun to play those kinds of characters.

I see this with experienced writers, too: They worry so much about the plot that they lose sight of the characters. They lose sight of why they are telling the story. They don't let the characters actually speak. Characters will start to dictate the story in sometimes surprising, emotional, and funny ways. If the writers are not open to those surprises, they're going to strangle the life, spark, or spirit out of their work.

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.

I think it's definitely beneficial for these characters to have good acting voices behind them and it affects the characters in a way that people can feel like they're part of the game and that they know these characters.

I'm drawn to female characters, not all of them are strong characters. I think I'm drawn to female characters partly because they don't have as easy or as obvious a relationship to power in society, and so they suffer under social constraints or have to maneuver within them in ways men sometimes don't, or are unconscious about, or have certain liberties that are invisible to them.

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.

Comic book characters are characters who wear costumes. They're not necessarily different than other characters. The trend I think that you're seeing are comic book movies, at least the ones that Marvel makes, don't have comic book stories. They have dramatic human stories.

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.

In terms of my relationships with a lot of the adult characters, when I was working with Harrison, it wasn't like a verbal agreement, but we both understood that because there was this constant tension between our characters, we couldn't say "Cut" and start acting normal. We had to keep an essence of that relationship in our characters off screen which is really important.

The reader has information about the characters that the characters themselves don't have. We all have our secret sides. Even I come to understand things about the characters only through the writing process, as I am going along.

There are characters in movies who I call 'film characters.' They don't exist in real life. They exist to play out a scenario. They can be in fantastic films, but they are not real characters; what happens to them is not lifelike.

I feel my fuller-bodied characters are all in the independent films I do, and in the studio productions, I have to work harder to dimensionalize the characters. And that's certainly part of the job description of an actor - that's what you're supposed to do - but you have to work harder at it in the characters that I've encountered in studio films.

I think there's grays in characters if you look at all the great characters, those characters that have those layers of being good and being bad and what's the struggle. It's always more interesting to watch.

You always take a little bit back with you at the end of the day. I always put a little bit of myself into the characters, too. You find parallels, points of connection, things like that. But I'm not an actor who gets so incredibly haunted by my characters that I can't come back.

I think it gets really dangerous, though, to do it on the show. I think that the writers and producers are very much aware of that and the dangers of putting characters together and what that can mean for the show. You know, it's possible it could kill the thing that holds the show together, the chemistry, sexual tension between the two characters.

Well, the thing about great fictional characters from literature, and the reason that they're constantly turned into characters in movies, is that they completely speak to what makes people human.

I don't know who they are[my characters] . They're entirely invented characters. Maybe that's how I've been able to write so many books, because there are no boundaries for me. I can write a completely fantastical story like "Swept Away" or "Blinded by the Light" and then a non-comic drama like "Chicxulub" or something like "Birnam Wood" that has autobiographical underpinnings. Why not?

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

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.

I like to hear and smell the countryside, the land that my characters inhabit. I don’t want these characters to step off the page, I want them to step out of the landscape.

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.

The relationship between reader and characters is very difficult. It is even more peculiar than the relationship between the writer and his characters.

Hemingway was a prisoner of his style. No one can talk like the characters in Hemingway except the characters in Hemingway. His style in the wildest sense finally killed him.

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.

Sometimes, the smaller roles in movies can be the most interesting. If you only take the stance that you'll only play central characters in movies, you'll find yourself not being able to indulge in that morally grey terrain that makes support characters so rich and interesting.

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

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.

The established characters are easy to recall. I don't know why, but they come back to me instantly when I need them. It's the one-time-only characters that I don't remember where the voice I used came from.

If you look at that incredible burst of fantastic characters that emerged in the late 19th century/early 20th century, you can see so many of the fears and hopes of those times embedded in those characters. Even in throwaway bits of contemporary culture you can often find some penetrating insights into the real world around us.

Nothing (at least that can be done by humans) immortalizes anyone. The Fault in Our Stars will hopefully have a long and wonderful life, but it will eventually go out of print, and eventually the last person ever to read it will die, and then the characters will no longer live in any consciousness.Also, that is okay. That is good, actually. That is how it should be. One of the things the characters in this novel have to grapple with is the reality of temporaryness. What Gus in particular must reconcile himself to is that being temporary does not mean being unimportant or meaningless.

I turned down all the requests for the rights to the books, for years, mostly because they wanted the rights to the characters, and to turn it into a TV series. This would have allowed them to do anything they wanted with the characters, and that just wasn't an option for me.

I would say any film can be called feminist that has female characters who have agency in their life, that are in charge of their fate or do important things or take up half the space. I would consider a film feminist, I don't care what it's about, but if the cast was gender balanced, where it would be just as likely that the boss or the best friend or whoever was female. It's really as simple as showing women being in charge of their destiny and giving female characters a voice.

I haven't got anything against films that are about the minutia of relationships or customs, but I love extremes. I love taking a bunch of characters and it usually is a bunch of characters, and you throw something at them that's usually extreme, like a bag of money, or you send them out to explode a nuclear device on the surface of the sun. And those extremes are wonderful for drama.

With all of the characters I've played, I feel like I've tried to communicate through my eyes and face, as much or more than with words. That's something that I like to watch in films, and something that I like to bring to the characters that I play.

A writer has to stand outside the page. It's not for the writer to shed tears onto the pages for these characters. It's not for him to suffer or to laugh or to experience ecstasy or agony in the manner of the characters on the pages.

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.

So, it's a delicate thing, but at the same time our producers and writers are very much aware of the potential downfall that could ensue so I think they're going to be very careful about how they do that. At the same time I don't think they want to leave the characters in the same holding pattern that they've been in for a while. I think that they're all trying to put the characters in a different situation.

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.

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.

Danny Boyle has been a huge, has had a huge effect on me. His movies, early movies like Trainspotting and those movies. So I've always loved the energies of those movies. But also, that they are very focused on the characters. Cause it's not only gimmickery, it's not only about visuals. You feel a real need, a love for the main characters. So that's what I've always loved about watching movies myself.

I prefer playing characters that are going through turmoil. Most movie characters are just in service to the story.

I have played several characters that are crabby and cranky. I don't know if I'm just not a very well-developed human being or if I don't know myself very well, but I tend to find I can take on elements of the characters that I'm playing. When I was playing a character like Becky Freeley in Miss Guided found that I was insanely positive and happy all the time.

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.

A radio play actually ended up being the first acting job I ever had. A lot of times when I'm on camera, I'm playing characters that are more like myself, and I don't get to do a lot of real character work. But when you're doing animation, you are the very epitome of colorful characters. I think I'm just really into make believe.

Because I had some roles that resonated with women, I immediately noticed that there were far more male characters than female characters in what we're showing little kids in the 21st century, which was stunning to me. But I couldn't find anybody else who noticed.