Quotes About Characters

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.

To me, feminism in literature deals with the female characters being in some way central to the thematic concerns of the book, or that they are agents of change to some degree. In other words, the lens is focused deeply and intensely on the female characters and doesn't waver, which allows for a glimpse into the rich inner lives of the characters.

All that matters to me as a reader are characters. I want characters to be real, authentic, and rounded. I will be digging into characters for at least a month. Who they are. What they are like. Outside of the story.

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.

I think that I write much more naturally about characters in solitude than characters interacting with others. My natural inclination - and one that I've learned to push against - is to give primacy to a character's interior world. Over the three books that I've written, I've had to teach myself that not every feeling needs to be described and that often the most impactful writing more elegantly evokes those unnamed feelings through the way characters speak and behave.

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.

People like stories that are bigger than life, about characters with unusual powers. And when you get all the characters in the zodiac, it's so colorful, and it's so rich in different attitudes that the characters have.

I take all my characters very seriously - the main, secondary, and supporting characters. Even if they only appear once, they still need to have their own life. Some characters are absent literally but at the same time very, very present.

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.

The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears is very much about America - it just happens to have African and Ethiopian characters, and in fact, it happens to have more characters who are not Ethiopian than who are.

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'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.

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.

You have to do three things really well to make a successful film. You have to tell a compelling story that has a story that is unpredictable, that keeps people on the edge of their seat where they can't wait to see what happens next. You then populate that story with really memorable and appealing characters. And then, you put that story and those characters in a believable world, not realistic but believable for the story that you're telling.

he beauty of this world [of comics] is there are so many stories to tell, and there's so many wonderful characters. Wonderful characters we haven't even begun to introduce - it's a world that is infinitely expandable.

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.

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

Creating characters is like throwing together ingredients for a recipe. I take characteristics I like and dislike in real people I know, or know of, and use them to embellish and define characters.

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.

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!

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 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.

The characters I tend to play are a little more interesting than the standard heroes. Romantic leads can be a little more straightforward, I guess. But it just seems to be the parts I get, I don't know what that says about me. I enjoy interesting characters and interesting people, I suppose.

As an audience member, I live vicariously through the characters I watch or read about. There's something very relatable about comic-book characters. They're never perfect. They're flawed people put in extraordinary circumstances.

Once I start work on a project, I don’t stop and I don’t slow down unless I absolutely have to. If I don’t write every day, the characters begin to stale off in my mind – they begin to seem like characters instead of real people. The tale’s narrative cutting edge starts to rust and I begin to lose my hold on the story’s plot and pace. Worst of all, the excitement of spinning something new begins to fade. The work starts to feel like work, and for most writers that is the smooch of death.

What I like to do as an actor is transform. It's way more fun to play characters who are completely different than me. I like playing characters who appear one way on the outside but are actually very different from that.

I like to think of characters in relation to other cinematic characters.

I want to try not to repeat myself. But then I seem to do it continuously in my films. It's not something I make any effort to do. I just want to make films that are personal, but interesting to an audience. I feel I get criticized for style over substance, and for details that get in the way of the characters. But every decision I make is how to bring those characters forward.

Where would David Copperfield be if Dickens had gone to writing classes? Probably about seventy minor characters short, is where. (Did you know that Dickens is estimated to have invented thirteen thousand characters? Thirteen thousand! The population of a small town!)

I'm attracted to stories that excite my imagination, stories that, as I'm reading the script, I feel it, I can see it, I can hear the characters. I'm attracted to characters that are real, that tap into something inside me that I haven't explored yet.

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.

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.

The tree or the road - the ones I know of, finally they are the only characters I know really. The human characters I don't know. So there is both something I know and something I don't know. And I put them together.

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.

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

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.

You'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?

The way I see the job, my definition of it, is to create characters to the best of your ability and then fit into what's trying to be accomplished in the general framework of the film. I think that's whether you're doing this- even if you're doing musical theater. That's what I think an actors job is. I don't know. I like to think what an actors job is is to create characters.

I don't see a difference between playing a performance capture role and a live action role, they're just characters to me at the end of the day and I'm an actor who wants to explore those characters in fantastically written scripts. The only caveat is a good story is a good character.

His soul is in his stories. I once asked him who inspired him to create his characters, and his answer was no one. That all his characters were himself.

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.

There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.

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.

There's this whole grey area seemingly every time it's talked about animators and who takes ultimate responsibility for the characters [of the Planet of the apes] but without question and I'll go down saying this year after year, these characters are authored by what we do on set. They are not authored by animators.

As a feminist, I think you never want to have your characters defined by the relationships that they're in, and it did give her a chance to be a sophomore in college without a boyfriend.

Some actors might just do one thing, and another actor does another thing. I do an awful lot of preparation with the script, really. What I do is repeat the script, over and over and over again. Through that, it's almost like it seeps into my enamel. I'm reading all the characters, as well as my own. That is where the bulk of my preparation goes into.

Number one rule for fiction: Coincidence can be used to worsen a characters predicament, but never to solve his problems.

There's a lot about the character. It doesn't always happen, but there are some characters you really create a relationship with, almost as if they were your friend. And you never get into their heads again or think like them.