Popular quotes about Characters! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 5
Before you start production, you have characters you have created without actors in mind, then all of a sudden you've got actors. They bring an enormous amount in creating these characters, and creating the dynamics between the characters that you've written.
Charlie KaufmanI had played many gay characters before, but they were finite - guest characters in TV shows or characters in plays.
Eric McCormackFortunately, we have writers who very much respect the classic characters and the integrity of the classic characters, that are also terrific comedy writers and are able to put these classic characters in new and interesting, and quite funny situations for today.
Bob BergenI 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".
Mike MignolaIn 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.
Asa ButterfieldWhen 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 wonโt allow their characters to go down those roads... Iโve never put any roadblocks on any of these paths. My characters can go wherever they would naturally go, and Iโll follow them.
Quentin TarantinoI 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.
Jamie FoxxAny plot you impose on your characters will be onomatopoetic: PLOT. I say don't worry about plot. Worry about the characters. Let what they say or do reveal who they are, and be involved in their lives, and keep asking yourself, Now what happens? The development of relationship creates plot.
Anne LamottYou 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.
Mark McGrathThere are characters in some short stories who exist as people, and there are other characters in different short stories who exist as purely literary constructs. You know, the young man in "Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire" - I probably got that right - is a literary construct, and enjoys being a literary construct. He has no life off stage, whereas the young men in "How to Talk to Girls at Parties" were as near to being real human beings as I could possibly get them.
Neil GaimanIt starts with the writing. We have to think of all these characters - we have to treat them all equally. We have to think of them as having an interior life and having motivations. When I'm drawing female characters, I'm looking for that. I'm looking for subtext. I'm looking for ways to make the reader relate to them in a way that goes beyond the pure aesthetic value. You know, just drawing an attractive woman really gets kind of boring after a while.
Cliff ChiangI'm just trying to write a good story, strictly from imagination. People just think it's random, they don't see the rewriting, phrasing of characters, choosing the words, bringing the world to light in which the characters live in. That creates an illusion that this is real.
Eric Jerome DickeyI really love doing indie projects, I think the characters that are available in indie games especially, like a lot of the indie games I've done, have been really rich interesting characters for someone of my vocal range.
Ashly BurchBesides 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 donโt, 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.
Ann BrasharesSometimes, 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.
Joel EdgertonNice characters are boring! I like writing upbeat characters - that's my natural tendency.
Marjorie M. LiuPeople are infinitely more interesting than characters that I come up with. Because the characters I come up with are basically combinations of people I've met. Combinations. You select certain details, that's all.
Sarnath BanerjeeShort of a small range of physical acts-a fight, murder, lovemaking-dialogue is the most vigorous and visible inter-action of which characters in a novel are capable. Speech is what characters do to each other.
Elizabeth BowenLiterature doesn't have a country. Shakespeare is an African writer. His Falstaff, for example, is very African in his appetite for life, his largeness of spirit. The characters of Turgenev are ghetto dwellers. Dickens characters are Nigerians.
Ben OkriI look at the books on my library shelves. They certainly seem dormant. But what if the characters are quietly rearranging themselves? What if Emma Woodhouse doesn't learn from her mistakes? What if Tom Jones descends into a sodden life of poaching and outlawry? What if Eve resists Satan, remembering God's injunction and Adam's loving advice? I imagine all the characters bustling to get back into their places as they feel me taking the book down from the shelf. Hurry, they say, he'll expect to find us exactly where he left us, never mind how much his life has changed in the meantime.
Verlyn KlinkenborgNothing (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.
John GreenMy American accent is really, really good. I started out in the theater, doing all different characters with all different accents. When I first came to America, I thought I would be playing American, all the time. It was just weird how it worked out that I played more international characters.
Rebel WilsonWe're at a point nowhere it has to change. We have characters that are not alive that are alive in the book. We have characters that never appeared in the book. We have a lot of events that didn't quite happen the same way in the book. But there's so much in the book, stuff we've passed in the timeline that I really thought was awesome, that I really wanted to get to.
Scott M. GimpleEverybody has their different tastes with television - there are some characters people like, some characters people hate.
Jake M. JohnsonGoogle and others truncate headlines at 70 characters. On the Manti Teo story, Deadspin's scoop fell down the Google search results, overtaken by copycat stories with simpler headlines. Deadspin's headline was 118 characters. Vital information - 'hoax' - was one of the words that was cut off.
Nick DentonWhat people like are things to laugh at. Funny shows. It's all in the execution, the writing and the characters, not the setting. And the writing and the execution and the characters are GREAT on (Everybody Loves Raymond).
Joe RoganWith 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.
Dakota FanningDisney has a bible for their characters, so that people who draw Disney characters have to make them look correct.
Trina RobbinsOn 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.
Curtis HansonYeah, we've become really good friends. Our characters start dating in the book, and um, yeah, I think we - and we made up little back stories to our characters and little outtakes that we'd bring up to Edgar as a joke, and you know, kind of see different sides of stuff. So yeah, we have a really good time.
Johnny SimmonsYou've got all these characters and yet, you're hovering over one character like a fly over a stinky diaper. Realize that you've got a kickass superpower: you can possess and take-over anybody inside the story. With the power of Point-of-View, you can drag us along for the ride. You can shove us into their eyes, their minds, you can force us to piggyback on their experiences past and present. Sometimes untangling a knotted-up tale means looking at it from different eyes: what better eyes than those of the other characters inside the story?
Chuck WendigI'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.
George R. R. MartinI do believe that characters in novels belong to their writers and their readers pretty equally. I've learned a lot of things about the characters I write from people who read about them. Readers expand them in ways I don't think of and take them to places I can't go.
Ann BrasharesCompared 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.
William JamesAll my characters exist in risk, in the places we are either too afraid to go to, or have enough privilege not to have to, but whatever the reason, these characters I fashion go before us and come back transformed for us. For me, at least.
Chris AbaniThe secrets that the characters hold are held back from the audience, and that's such a delight to hold onto. When you're playing scenes, it gives you an inner dialogue that allows you to really immerse yourself as the actor, in every scene that you're playing. Nothing felt expositional. Nothing felt like we were just doing it to move the story along. There was a reason these characters were saying what they're saying. It was a gift, really.
Tom HughesOne of the great things about writing a series is that with each book, the novel is meant to stand alone on its own legs, but also to bring along those loyal readers who become attached to the characters over the years.
Linda FairsteinI 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.
Christopher ReeveDeath stamps the characters and conditions of men for eternity. - As death finds them in this world, so will they be in the next.
Nathanael EmmonsI 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.
Nina DobrevI think people enjoy a series. When you like a story, many readers want more of the same, which is dandy, if the author and the characters have more to say.
Sarah ZettelI will never do Pulp [Fiction] 2 but having said that, I could very well do other movies with these characters.
Quentin TarantinoI 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.
Jemaine ClementBaseball is more like a novel than a war. It is like an ongoing, hundred-year work of art, peopled with thousands of characters, full of improbable events, anecdotes, folklore and numbers.
Luke SalisburyI would tell any actress that the trick is to play all the female characters on your show, and then all the men are yours.
Sarah Michelle Gellar