Character Quotes - Page 234

Depending on the year or the therapist he was seeing, he'd learned to ascribe just about every facet of his character as a psychological reaction to his parents' fighting: his laziness, his overachieving, his tendency to isolate, his tendency to seduce, his hypochondria, his sense of invulnerability, his self-loathing, his narcissism.

My books are primarily plot driven but the best plot in the world is useless if you don't populate them with characters that readers can care about.

Everybody has their favorite character.That's the only way I pick, whatever is going on in society, whatever I think folks will laugh at that's what I come up with.

I've tried the female thing. I was in a movie called Dinner for Schmucks a couple of years ago with Steve Carell and I created a female character for that movie. And after a few months of trying her out on the road it just didn't work. I mean, I can think like a terrorist, I can think like a white trash guy, I can even try and think like an African American, but I can't figure out how a woman.

There are some actors that want you to call them by their character's name and they have no relationship with you outside of the character. But I like to get to know who I'm working with so that we can relax together, and it's more fun.

Once, during an interview in front of my wife, I was asked, "Are you one of those actors who brings your character home? Do you stay in character?" I said, "No, not really. I don't do that," and she started laughing. I asked her why. She said, "Well, you might think you don't bring characters home, but you do." So, while I don't feel like a character is lingering, it probably is.

I gradually work myself into a frenzy as the shoot approaches, while we're choosing the costumes or working with the make-up artist. I'm not so much interested in my character as the film itself.

To give a character life in a short space of time, it helps if you arrive on screen with a past.

I wanted to invent myself as a fictional character. And I did, and it has caused a great deal of confusion.

Great control and great discipline are necessary when you reach your own editing stage of the book, but in the early stages you have to be prepared to let anything happen and to get it wrong or go off track. The development of a character is not smooth or simple - it is as tricky as meeting someone new whom you would like to know better.

The theatre has built a whole art round the actor, based on the man and his double - the actor and his character.

...the characters in my books all resemble each other. They live, with minor variations, the same moments, the same perils, and when I speak of them, my language, which is inspired by them, repeats the same poems in the same tone.

When a man puts on a Character he is a stranger to, there's as much difference between what he appears, and what he is really in himself, as there is between a VIzor and a Face.

The whole genius of an author consists in describing well, and delineating character well. Homer, Plato, Virgil, Horace only excel other writers by their expressions and images; we must indicate what is true if we mean to write naturally, forcibly and delicately.

False modesty is the masterpiece of vanity: showing the vain man in such an illusory light that he appears in the reputation of the virtue quite opposite to the vice which constitutes his real character; it is a deceit.

We had to do the same thing here. To top that sequel was quite a task. Mike had a couple of good conceptual humour and character ideas, which got me back into it.

You have to think of each stage of the movie and how it progresses, get into the state of mind of the character, and then match the camera to that, and keep making it tighter and tighter and crazier and crazier so people don't get bored. You know you cannot do a similar shot that you did at the beginning of the movie at the end.

I would love to take an old space and restore it to exactly the way I want it. Like an old factory, just something with great bones and lots of character. I'd take an old house and flip it into something very modern inside, or the other way around.

When you're young, you want to make every kind of film: musicals, Westerns, horror. Slowly you begin to hear your own voice. I hope people receive what I do as small, personal films that are somewhat contrarian about their main characters.

In order for American Pie to have worked, you have to have a character who, even while he is humping a pie, the audience still likes

I like to think what I bring to the table is kind of a sympathetic and endearing quality, even while I'm playing outcasts or characters that end up in outlandish situations.

I always try to honor a character by being honest and truthful to who they are, in spite of my own personality and beliefs.

I suppose meeting people whether it's in real life and actually shaking their flesh and blood hand or shaking the mystical hand of the character all rub off on you in some way.

Fidelity to the subject's thought and to his characteristic way of expressing himself is the sine qua non of journalistic quotation.

I always knew that I could go deep. How deep? I don't know. But it always seems that with each character I take on, I'm challenged to go deeper than the last time, and then again deeper than the last time. This is the deepest I've ever been asked to dive. And to see how deep I actually went for this, and that I wasn't afraid to go there in order to give Tyler exactly what he envisioned for the character, which was pretty deep, that's what I discovered about myself.