Character Quotes - Page 305

All my characters are me. I'm not a good enough actor to become a character. I hear about actors who become the role and I think 'I wonder what that feels like.' Because for me, they're all me.

The climate of Ohio is perfect, considered as the home of an ideal republican people. Climate has much to do with national character.... A climate which permits labor out-of-doors every month in the year and which requires industry to secure comfort--to provide food, shelter, clothing, fuel, etc.--is the very climate which secures the highest civilization.

The thing is, about a character, it's not about being right, it's about the truth. The truth comes from within, so you have to search as an artist for the truth.

The fact of the matter is, Obama and the Democrats did a number on Mitt Romney's reputation and his character and his image with outrageous commercials that I thought nobody in their right mind was gonna believe. I know they're gonna appeal to somebody, but they appeal to far more. People may not have believed it specifically, but it did enough damage to make people say, "I don't know. I just don't like this Romney guy. Stick with what we got."

We used to have adults who set standards, moral standards, cultural standards, legal standards. They were better than we were. They gave us something to aspire to. They were people that we described as having dignity and character. That's all gone now, particularly the upper levels of the Democrat Party. There isn't any of that kind of decency, dignity, character, morality.

When you try to do one step forward to attain knowledge about the hidden truths, then do the same time three steps forward to perfect your character.

It's always about a character that I become obsessed with and who refuses to leave me alone.

I left things out - my motivations, my history, my emotional responses - because I am not good at understanding them or writing about them. I tried and it was generally boring and always unconvincing. Most importantly I wanted to try to place Afghans and Afghanistan in the foreground rather than my own character.

A nation's greatness is measured not just by its gross national product or military power, but by the strength of its devotion to the principles and values that bind its people and define their character.

The richly cadenced prose is hypnotic, the research prodigious, the analysis acute, the mood spellbinding, and the cast of characters mythic in scale. I cannot conceive of a better book about Capitol Hill. An unforgettable, epic achievement in the art of biography.

Does not the possibility or the power to do something about the situation at hand confer on one the responsibility to do it?

Shooting in New York is the shiznit, if I may be so bold. It was great. New York is a character. People who live here know that.

Swinburne was an absurd character. He was a bird of showy strut and plumage. One could not but admire his glorious feathers; but, as soon as he began to moult ... one saw how very little body there was underneath.

When one has praised Turgenev, however, for the beauty of his character and the beautiful truth of his art, one remembers that he, too, was human and therefore less than perfect. His chief failing was, perhaps, that of all the great artists, he was the most lacking in exuberance. That is why he began to be scorned in a world which rated exuberance higher than beauty or love or pity.

You should let dialogue get as nearly out of control as you can. Characters should say what they say to each other instead of what they mean to say. The worst purpose of dialogue is to elicit information: "You know why we're out on this space station, Carruthers - to save the universe!"

I don't even know if Stephenie Meyer could tell you why she was so fixated on this very, very contained story [The Twilight] with obsessive characters. It's just an anomaly. That's a terrible answer. I don't know.

It is the property of things seen for the first time, or for the first time after long, like the flowers in spring, to reawaken in us the sharp edge of sense and that impression of mystic strangeness which otherwise passes out of life with the coming of years; but the sight of a loved face is what renews a man's character from the fountain upwards.

All characters are based on elements of a writer's personal experience.

Because it is a radical act of freedom, creative achievement is a heroic process that requires, in all its permutations, specific strengths of character.

We knew before we came (to earth) that there would be many adverse circumstances to test us: accidents, sickness, and disease to prove us; temptations and distractions to try us; disappointments, discouragements, reverses, failures and all kinds of situations to determine our character.

I pulled the Johnny character from the Jamaican Johnny Too Bad thing.

A lot of the characters I play have problems, they are marginalised, they have serious psychological problems, problems with relationships, with childhood. These are big subjects, big subjects. You can't balk at work like that. As an actor, that's as good as it gets.

What is to be done with people who can't read a Sunday paper without messing it all up?... Show me a Sunday paper which has been left in a condition fit only for kite flying, and I will show you an antisocial and dangerous character who has left it that way.

The really good thing about my career is that I never went through a phase where I played characters who had names like "Partygoer," "Waiter," or "Guy #1."

Sam Seaborn is the best character that's ever been written for me, certainly. By far. And it's a timeless show [The West Wing], one that's having another resurgence now, with people so in an uproar politically.