Character Quotes - Page 246

Chess is a forcing house where the fruits of character can ripen more fully than in life

Every Englishman is an average Englishman: it is a national characteristic.

Sometimes you have to search for inspiration with characters, and other times, they just drop out of the sky and arrive.

The core of character lies in each individual story person's ability to care about something; to feel implicitly or explicitly that something is important.

As an actor, you can have your own backstory and prepare all the details that you need to know for your character.

The character of a whole society is the cumulative result of the countless small actions, day in and day out, of millions of persons. Who we are as a society, is the synergistic accumulation of who we are as individuals... Small changes that seem insignificant in isolation can be great contributions when they are simultaneously undertaken by many others.

But Germany will always suffer, I fear, from the intensely dramatic character of the crimes of the Third Reich.

Storytelling is ultimately a creative act of pattern recognition. Through characters, plot and setting, a writer creates places where previously invisible truths become visible. Or the storyteller posits a series of dots that the reader can connect.

I think making a great action movie is one of the hardest cinematic endeavors. By definition, smart characters avoid action. Smart people don't go down dark alleys, but if you're making an action movie and you want to have an action sequence, somehow you have to get that character into that dangerous situation.

There is no human relationship more intimate than that of nurse and patient, one in which the essentials of character are more rawly revealed.

I don't make comparisons between any movies. I compare characters. All my actions, performances, all my films, they are driven by the characteristic. If I'm playing a cop, then I give him a particular style - I may not know that style, but as an actor I have to be responsible to do your homework and do your research and training and stuff like that.

I didnt get arrested to show off my wild character. People say its a gimmick for all five of us to be different. Thats ridiculous.

I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.

I was always cutting dialogue out when we were rehearsing, and when I produced movies, too. I felt that people don't say things in life - they act, they do things. I always wanted my characters doing, rather than saying what they were doing - which was redundant.

When I do a film, the days before or the night before, I throw up. Sometimes it's just in my mouth and I swallow it back, but sometimes it's real. Whatever it is, it's hard. I don't do the first five or ten minutes of my character's appearance in a movie until the middle of the shooting schedule because I don't want him to be defined by my nervousness. So, we do the middle of the picture first.

I do not use any set methods, not even The Method. The character after all is in the lines.

If the point of life is the same as the point of a story, the point of life is character transformation. If I got any comfort as I set out on my first story, it was that in nearly every story, the protagonist is transformed. He's a jerk at the beginning and nice at the end, or a coward at the beginning and brave at the end. If the character doesn't change, the story hasn't happened yet. And if story is derived from real life, if story is just condensed version of life then life itself may be designed to change us so that we evolve from one kind of person to another.

If you treat your characters like people, they'll reward you by being fully developed individuals.

America is the world's living myth. There's no sense of wrong when you kill an American or blame America for some local disaster. This is our function, to be character types, to embody recurring themes that people can use to comfort themselves, justify themselves and so on. We're here to accommodate. Whatever people need, we provide. A myth is a useful thing.

If you look at the game and everything, it's not quite like looking at an animated film, because that's total character. This, this is really movement, but it's got funny little things if you look for the humor. They're actually getting to the character.

In the first place, the church can ask the state whether its actions are legitimate and in accordance with its character as state, i.e., it can throw the state back on its responsibilities. Secondly, it can aid the victims of state action. The church has an unconditional obligation to the victims of any ordering of society, even if they do not belong to the Christian community. The third possibility is not just to bandage the victims under the wheel, but to put a spoke in the wheel itself.

I see pictures in my mind and become the character in the song as I'm writing. It's kind of method songwriting, where you're the actor in the song.

These are characters in a fairy tale for grown-ups. Wouldn't it be lovely? Yes.

When you reach for the horizon, as I've proven, you may not get there, but what a tremendous build of character and spirit that you lay down. What a foundation you lay down in reaching for those horizons.

When I'm onstage doing standup, no one yells "Cut!" or tells me what to do. I'm DeRay, and I use my own words. With acting, you're portraying a character with someone else's words. Still, you definitely want to inject a little of yourself into every role.