Quotes About Characters

When writers are self-conscious about themselves as writers they often keep a great distance from their characters, sounding as if they were writing encyclopedia entries instead of stories. Their hesitancy about physical and psychological intimacy can be a barrier to vital fiction. Conversely, a narration that makes readers hear the characters' heavy breathing and smell their emotional anguish diminishes distance. Readers feel so close to the characters that, for those magical moments, they become those 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I don't want to know about the lives of other actors and I don't want people to know too much about me. If we don't know about the private lives of other actors, that leaves us as clean slates when it comes to playing characters. That's the point, they can create these other characters and I can believe them. I think if you're a good enough actor, that's the way to longevity in the film business. Keep everybody guessing.

Respect your characters, even the ­minor ones. In art, as in life, everyone is the hero of their own particular story; it is worth thinking about what your minor characters' stories are, even though they may intersect only slightly with your protagonist's.

The last few years I've had to force myself to go out and be more involved the world because I can get a bit more cerebral and escape into characters and the world of characters. But now I guess I escape into stories about 'Wilfred.

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.

There are good characters and bad 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 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.

Where are the flamboyant characters?! This is what America desperately needs right now! Flamboyant intellectual characters who can cut different ways. And, that's just what I'm missing.

I think the universal themes of "American Pie" are what make it attractive to everybody. How to people relate to these characters? It's because these five male characters in this movie wouldn't ordinarily be in the same friend group and they each have their own part to play in the whole thing. There's a character for everybody in this movie that they can relate to... that they either were or knew someone that was. To cover the range like that is pretty unique to our franchise.

I'm socially awkward. What draws me to playing socially awkward characters? I think they're interesting. I'm fascinated kind of by - I mean, I know I'm sure I've got my own social awkwardness but I'm kind of fascinated by that and I lived, probably, I attribute it - I lived in New York for a long time, road the subways, saw a lot of awkwardness, but they're just interesting. They're not cookie cutter. They're usually very colorful characters. They see things different ways and, I don't know, its just a kind of - just a kind of life that interesting to me.

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.

In comparing these two writers, he [Samuel Johnson] used this expression: "that there was as great a difference between them as between a man who knew how a watch was made, and a man who could tell the hour by looking on the dial-plate." This was a short and a figurative statement of his distinction between drawing characters of nature and characters only of manners, but I cannot help being of opinion, that the neat watches of Fielding are as well constructed as the large clocks of Richardson, and that his dial plates are brighter.

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.

My daughter was a toddler. I had no idea there was anything wrong with kids' media.I started watching little preschool shows with her or G-rated videos or whatever; I couldn't believe what I was seeing, that there seemed to be far more male characters than female characters in what we make for little kids. It was just a shock.

My characters are usually composites. I wish I could pretend that I make up all of these characters, but no. I steal from people. But people will say to me, "Oh, that's me!" and I'm thinking, no, that's not you!

It's nuts that we've reached a situation where representing female characters - let alone minorities - is considered "social responsibility" and not, you know, depicting half the world's population. I often feel like the gaming audience is so much more diverse than the characters represented in the games that they play.

The whole nature of the show [ Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency] is that everything is connected, and everything is interconnected. You have all of these strands with all of these characters, and you watch the characters interact and you wonder, "What do they have to do with each other? How does any of this link?"

A writer can't just be well-educated or good at research; to build a living, breathing world with interesting characters, you have to write from the gut. I'm not saying you have to live your life like a fantasy adventure. The trick is the ability to synthesize your own everyday experiences into your fiction. Infuse your characters with believable emotions and motivations. Infuse your world with rich sensory detail. For that you have to be in touch with your own existence and your own soul, the dark and the light of it.

Some TV shows are like really good novels in that there are enough episodes that you start to have your own feelings about how the characters should act. When the scriptwriters go slightly wrong, when they make the character make a left turn that he or she wouldn't do, you know enough about the characters to say, "No, that's not what she would do there. That's wrong." You can actually argue with a TV show in a way that you can't do as much with movie - you inhabit a TV show in the way you inhabit a novel.

I love everything. I love being the empathetic characters. I love being the villains. I think it's like when we're kids, we like to play all kinds of crazy characters and dress up.

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.

I've worked with a lot of characters that are unhinged. I've played characters that are unhinged. That's, like, my job.

All the characters in my books are imagined, but all have a bit of who I am in them - much like the characters in your dreams are all formed by who you are

To me, truth is the big thing. Constantly you're writing something and you get to a place where your characters could go this way or that and I just can't lie. The characters have gotta be true to themselves.

We know that we need to explore desire in fiction - many say that the only way a story exists is that a character feels a strong desire - and nature is the place where creatures act on their desires in the most pure way imaginable, so maybe nature also works as a metaphor for whatever emotional troubles my characters have to negotiate. I'm interested in my characters as survivors, and maybe that works best when the old-fashioned notion of humans surviving in wilderness is not too far away.

When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away - even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.

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.

The most fun characters to work with are characters that are complicated.

We have to give our poor, innocent, and undeserving-of-our-badness characters trouble in order to make them characters in a story.

I think it's human nature to go and to watch things that are done, and see the flaws, but I cannot think of anything that we would want to go so far as to completely change or redo to be honest with you. I think there are characters, you look at the Thor: Ragnarok trailer, there are characters that can evolve and can continue to change and grow throughout.

There is no obligation for the author of a film to believe in, or to sympathise with, the moral behaviour of his characters. Nor is he necessarily to be accredited with the same opinions as his characters. Nor is it necessary or obligatory for him to believe in the tenet of his construction - all of which is a disclaimer to the notion that the author of Drowning by Numbers believes that all men are weak, enfeebled, loutish, boorish and generally inadequate and incompetent as partners for women. But it's a thought.

Women are always murdered and maimed, and they’re never given their rightful place as lead characters! And I think [creator Michael Hirst] has just written what should have been written a long time ago. There shouldn’t be anything that different about Vikings, but there is, because there’ve just been so many shows that have not stepped up to the plate and given female actors and female characters equal footing.

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.

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

I'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.

When I write a book, I don't have a plan or an outline. The characters move the action, and the action develops the characters. When I write a book, I become an actor, really, taking the role of the person who is speaking or acting at the time, and so their reactions to whatever they see are my reactions.

I approach writing female characters the same why I approach writing male characters. I never think I'm writing about women, I think I'm writing about one woman, one person. And I try to imagine what she is like, and endow her with a lot of my own thoughts and history.

I'm interested in gay characters - not trying to sensationalize gay characters, just [representing] who are in my personal life. I'm interested in exploring my world and my friends, and a lot of them happen to be gay.

What characters do must grow out of who they are, and who they are is, in turn, influenced by what you make happen to them.

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.

Death stamps the characters and conditions of men for eternity. - As death finds them in this world, so will they be in the next.