Character Quotes

I read mostly science-fiction and fantasy when I was a teenager, and I was always drawn to stories where the characters had telepathic powers.

I love complex characters - strong females who are vulnerable but have a life and soul. That's what I'm drawn to and what I enjoy most.

I'm drawn to damaged, complicated characters.

Every actor turns everything round to their character.

For character, to prepare for the inevitable I recommend selections from [Ralph Waldo] Emerson. His writings have done for me far more than all other reading.

Whenever people get to see you, it's a great thing. Once people see an image and see the character, they can get into the music a lot more.

I just have my own taste, and I just try and stick with that. I'm just trying to play as many characters as I can for as long as I have an opportunity to.

I know there are only so many characters I'll be able to play.

I think that you can sort of have your own personal journey and you know, you can just kind of apply that to whatever characters you're playing.

If you're making a movie about the effects of time, you kind of have to engage time as the main character.

The job of the art is to really convey and support that empathetic response. I always try to find where the character is mushy, and then bring that to the forefront.

It's tough. It's very tricky to throw a morally flexible character onto the screen and have an audience empathize. It's always an exercise in restraint.

Character acting is a much braver pursuit than a guy who runs around and intermittently clenches his jaw muscles.

There's always something more to be accomplished with a character. Theater is a human experience. There's nothing shellacked or finished off about it. I guess that's why it always draws me back.

Aamir Khan told me that I was doing Sameer's character all wrong in Dil Chahta Hai

Slavery is not penal in character and planned by that law which commands the preservation of the natural order and forbids disturbance.

The opportunities I've had to play really complex characters - which haven't been a lot, but some - you never get over them.

I'm an actor. I'm trying to be the character and do what they're doing.

I love disappearing. That's what acting is. For me it's about putting on a persona, stepping into a pair of shoes. It's my face, but I'm using it as a tool for that spirit, that character.

I grew up with 'Jane Eyre,' reading it at school, and it's one of those, I think, for a lot of women, a lot of girls, it's the iconic story and so many girls relate to Jane Eyre and her character.

I think that a lot of women that know they're going to be part of history somehow decide to have a character to be remembered by.

Matthew Wiener on Mad Men writes the entire series before they start shooting, and if you have that, then what you can do with character and story is not at all unlike what you can do in a novel.

When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.

What I've always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characters, and also my own, intersect with the public life of the culture.

I've never yet managed to write a novel which didn't have an Indian central character.

Fitzcarraldo is that metonymic character that's unwilling to give up on his dreams. Meeting Walter was the point in which all of these dreams coalesced into a very real person with a very real story.

For me the costume is always a huge part of getting into character.

I did some martial arts training for 'Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,' since the character was an assassin.

The Killing Fields, my character's teachings frame the movie and the argument of his lectures is the challenge of dealing with the painfulness of life in the absence of faith.

I hate the analyzing thing. People say, 'Why do you think your character did that? I don't know. I'm not an analyst, and they're not in psychotherapy. Unless it's a film where they're in therapy.

I grew up singing professionally since I was 7 years old and so to get to play a character who's living out their Rock star dreams as JEM was pretty much epic.

The wish to spread those opinions that we hold conducive to our own welfare is so deeply rooted in the English character that few of us can escape its influence.

The moral and intellectual character of the Africans is widely different in different nations.

Scarce any man becomes eminently disagreeable but by a departure from his real character, and an attempt at something for which nature or education has left him unqualified.

If a man could say nothing against a character but what he can prove, history could not be written.

Marriage is the best state for man in general, and every man is a worst man in proportion to the level he is unfit for marriage.

On Sir Joshua Reynolds's observing that the real character of a man was found out by his amusements. Yes, Sir, no man is a hypocrite in his pleasures.

Energy of will may be defined to be the very central power of character in a man.

Work is one of the best educators of practical character.

As there is much beast and some devil in man, so is there some angel and some God in him. The beast and the devil may be conquered, but in this life never destroyed.

Fellows of colleges in the universities are in one sense the recipients of alms, because they receive funds which originally were of an eleemosynary character.

I come from the theater, and I've done a lot of character work in the theater, but Hollywood stuff in film and TV, they've been more leading lady/ingenue type roles.

I think I'm a character actress in a leading lady's body, but the industry doesn't really see me that way.

I think of my books now as suspense novels, usually with a love story incorporated. They're absolutely a lot harder to write than romances. They take more plotting and real character development.

The costume designer designing clothes that helped the comedy in The Proposal, that sold the character. Each and every detail was so perfectly thought of, what wouldn't be here? That's a lost art.

Ive never really played everyday people. Ive played realist roles, but not mere daily life. There was always something incredible happening to my characters

I'm not sure that I have a favorite either on-screen or in the books! Whenever I'm writing, I'm always really excited to dive back into each character.

Very often the characters people respond to best have little parts of reality they can relate to.

My first job is to write the characters as full and authentic people as well as I can.

I'm not really a plot writer - I'm more interested in the characters and sort of small events that propel the story forward.