Character Quotes - Page 293

What I like to write about is stuff I know. I don't think I could write a novel. I don't think I have it in me to come up with those kinds of characters.

As readers, we want not only a strong story, but also characters we can relate to, characters that feel real. We have to find something of ourselves in them. Each character, even those only there to serve the mechanics of the plot, should have a number of layers. The entire world you are stepping into as a reader must feel real. It must have resonance, you must be able to touch the light; smell the smells.

My books are character-driven. They're not driven by the story.

I read a lot of articles about young women in the resistance. All of a sudden, I felt that if I go too much into this horror, then I won't be able to start as a fresh character.

My character in 'Shame' is an outrageous person. Loud and uncompromising and I begged Steve McQueen to give me the job.

I don't think I want to play title roles. I don't want to be the face on the poster. I don't want that pressure of having the success riding on my shoulders. I just want to play the most interesting parts. I actually think it's incredibly rare to get an interesting female character that is the lead in a film. Usually the character parts are so much more interesting to play.

I've never done coke or anything, and I've never played a character who has, so I don't know whether I would actually try coke if I had to play a character who took coke.

It's nice getting to play a different version of yourself. You sign on for a show and think you're just going to play one character for however many years, so it's nice, for an actor, to have a little bit of fun.

Zachary Roerig who plays Matt, he's just a character.

The people cannot look to legislation generally for success. Industry, thrift, character, are not conferred by act or resolve. Government cannot relieve from toil. It can provide no substitute for the rewards of service. It can, of course, care for the defective and recognize distinguished merit. The normal must care for themselves. Self-government means self-support.

You can't do a movie without villains. You have to have something for the heroines or anti-heroines to be up against, and I wasn't going to contrive some monstrous female, but even if this were the most men-bashing movie ever made-let all us women get guns and kill men-it wouldn't even begin to make up for the 99% of all movies where the women are there to be caricatured as bimbos or to be skinned and decapitated. If men feel uncomfortable in the audience it is because they are identifying with the wrong character.

We do not see everything in the environment in the complete, totally resolved, explicit character of the photograph. We, in fact, prioritize our seeing.

I think the only productive way to approach characters, and frankly people in life, is through empathy. The minute we call someone a villain, we are choosing to part with empathy and that can be a slippery slope, both as an actor and a human being.

I want to play challenging characters. You should never be satisfied.

I think every leading man wants to be a character actor, and every character actor wants to be a leading man.

Part of accepting a role is being interested in the character and part of it is being interested in the movie or what it means and the exploration of it. But it's more about not knowing the answers to certain questions but wanting to go on the journey of discovery to find the answers.

When you see yourself as calm, positive, truthful and possessed of high character, you behave with greater strength. Other people respect you more. You feel in control of yourself and the situation.

Persistence is the great measure of individual human character.

There are, basically, three kinds of people: the unsuccessful, the temporarily successful, and those who become and remain successful. The difference is character.

Characters work really well when they're reflective of the times that they're operating in. To keep these characters static - like Superman was invented in the '30s, Wonder Woman in the '40s - if they were still operating under those kinds of constraints, they'd die. These pop cultures, just like Greek myths, they have to reflect the time their stories are being told. That's what makes them relevant.

Into The Wild" had a great sense of wild, unpredictable freedom that I loved and "Unforgiven" is just a great western with characters that walked the line between right/wrong with an ambiguity that felt very true to frontier life.

The finest defense of character is correct action. Acquaint yourself with virtue, and you can expect proper treatment from those around you.

There is a homely directness about these rustic apothegms which makes them far more palatable than the strained and sophisticated epigrams of the characters of Oscar Wilde's plays, who are ever striving strenuously to dazzle us with verbal pyrotechnics.

Shakespeare without Othello, Lear, Macbeth and Hamlet would be all too much like Hamlet without the prince.

I love it when characters surprise you, just like real people. When I write a scene I just try to make the characters behave in a way that feels natural to them. Sometimes that means they make a left turn and do something unexpected. Those are always the best scenes in my opinion.