Character Quotes

In 20 years I want to look back and see a collection of crazy characters that I made - a menagerie.

Shooting at night in Los Angeles is amazing. The city shuts down at 10 P.M. every night, and a whole different cast of characters comes out.

I think books are just a great ticket to get you outside of yourself. You can not be you for a second and live in the shoes of a character, which is a special thing.

There are characters that become more popular as we fall in love with them.

I enjoy pushing my characters to the limit. No matter how far out there I go, I look for things that make the characters human.

My characters all start with rhythms and sounds. Once I hear the voice and get into the rhythm, the attitude and the physicality just come out on their own.

I have this dream life where I get to be a celebrity but I get to kind of navigate the world fairly easily because I'm always in character.

You are always working towards the moments in which characters experience reckonings or insight or change. I like to track them past those moments.

Usually there is a paradox in what a character wants. A conflict is built deeply within them. And then you put them in motion, throw everything at them until they reveal themselves further.

When I write characters, I need to hear their voice. As soon as I get them speaking, and I feel how they use language, I understand who they are and what they want.

There are lots of authentic, moving characters in so-called systems novels, just as there are certainly deep structural ideas in some character-driven novels.

I would like to find a more precise way to not only tell the stories of female characters, but also do so in a female "way." My biggest advice would be to trust yourself.

It is only with distance that we are able to turn our powers of observation on ourselves, thus fashioning stories in which we are characters.

I write 1,000 words a day first thing in the morning but I cannot write 240 characters to describe a piece that I spent six weeks working on with a producer.

But in action, one defies one's character.

I'm more interested in characters who are a little difficult.

It’s not the job of an actor to judge your character.

I watched every single Bond movie three or four times, taking in everything I could about how the character had been portrayed in the past, then threw all that away once I started doing the role.

In many films, as many different characters, I've killed many different people.

I don't mind what the role is at all; I just want to play cool characters.

What's great in theater is that you can sustain the arc of a character for a full three hours, whereas in film or TV, you have to create that arc in little pieces, and usually out of sequence.

When you fight you are in a situation where failure can happen. This chance of failure forges your character in many ways.

Water, that wonderful, flowing medium, the luck of the planet - which would serve humankind in so many ways, and which would give our planet a special character.

The true greatness of a nation lies in its character, not in its economic or military power.

And well historically it's never been a good thing to compare yourself to biblical characters.

I've played a baseball player a few times, but in my career I've been blessed to have played a wide range of characters.

America has furnished to the world the character of Washington. And if our American institutions had done nothing else, that alone would have entitled them to the respect of mankind.

When you first get out of doing a show for a long time where you played a teenager, casting directors and producers all still look at you as being the character that you played for so long.

Writing is a solitary endeavor, but not a lonely one. When you write, your world is populated by the characters you invent and you feel those people filling your lives.

A book begins with an image or character or situation that I care about deeply.

By sharing an experience, or creating an experience that we all go through where the character survives - though not easily, I always say that it's victory at a price - does give people hope.

I believe a good memoir should have all of the narrative elements of a novel: character development, dialogue, descriptive language, and metaphor.

In New York, I much prefer playing older because as characters get older, they get more interesting.

My job is to focus on bringing characters to life in an honest and personal way.

I definitely feel like when I write a book it's not my job to police or guide the readers. The book and the characters don't belong to me anymore. If that makes sense.

Fear has disappeared. No more fear. In Asia, it is different. They've discovered again the fear and the psychology of the characters. Without psychology, the horror film doesn't exist.

That is another reason this transition for me into soaps makes sense for me, because I would get to work at my craft every day. I would be able to play this very real character.

A character is as much about what you do as what you say.

Most TV shows are about strong characters and strong actors, and we certainly have those.

You're breaking out of character, again.

I still do miss the freedom to play any kind of character I wanted to play.

With classic sitcoms like MASH, the characters all drove each other crazy, and that's what you loved to see.

In the writing phase, normally I try not to envisage any particular actors because I like to let the characters sort of reveal themselves in that process.

Guy Gavriel Kays Tigana is, in my opinion, one of the best, if not the best fantasy novel ever written. Its beautifully written, the characters are unforgettable, the worldbuilding is exquisite.

Actors are hard to photograph because they never want to reveal who they are. You don't know if you're getting a character from a Chekhov play or a Polanski film. It depends what mood they're in.

When you write a book, you want to have fidelity to the character. Characters and their emotions guide the structure of the novel.

There are different types of readers. People draw lines at which three things intersect: the character, the author, and the reader.

Some is, I think, the personal in any act of writing. You find yourself caught up: you start a sentence, and it becomes revelatory, not just of the character, but of you as well.

We may bend sometimes, but we don't break. There's a lot of character in that room

I think much has been made of this alter ego business. I mean, I actually stopped creating characters in 1975 - for albums, anyway.