Character Quotes - Page 329

Robert McKee says humans naturally seek comfort and stability. Without an inciting incident that disrupts their comfort, they won’t enter into a story. They have to get fired from their job or be forced to sign up for a marathon. A ring has to be purchased. A home has to be sold. The character has to jump into the story, into the discomfort and the fear, otherwise the story will never happen.

Opposites are attracted when each one is anxious about its own character.

It's so difficult, particularly with an antisocial character. It's much easier if he's already a blank page, but once you've written on him, it's hard to keep him that stripped down.

History is the record of encounters between character and circumstance.

In fiction, I tend to write fairly realistic dialogue-not always, and it tends to vary from book to book. But in many books, there is a colloquialism of address. The characters will speak in a quite idiosyncratic way sometimes.

The difference between the world of pictures and the world of printed matter is extraordinary and hard to define. A picture is like the masses: a multitude of impressions. A book on the other hand, with its linear advance of words and characters seems to be connected to individual identity.

My attitudes aren't directed toward characters at all. I don't feel sympathetic toward some characters, unsympathetic toward others. I don't love some characters, feel contempt for others. They have attitudes; I don't.

Everyone always says, Does it bother you that Italians are always portrayed as Mafia characters? No, it doesn't bother me. First of all, not everybody in my family is in the Mafia. I have one uncle who's clean.

It was fun to talk too much [as Jebediah Woodley], to keep running your mouth whether the other characters want to hear it or not. That's part of what made this guy fun.

It is a curious truth - and yet a truth forced upon us by daily observation - that it is not the women who have suffered most who are the unhappy women. A state of permanent unhappiness - not the morbid, half-cherished melancholy of youth, which generally wears off with wiser years, but that settled, incurable discontent and dissatisfaction with all things and all people, which we see in some women, is, with very rare exceptions, at once the index and the exponent of a thoroughly selfish character.

After that, all the while Millie was eating the pudding... we both tore Christopher's character to shreds. It was wonderful fun.... He drove everyone mad in Chrestomanci Castle by insisting on silk shirts and exactly the right kind of pajamas. 'And he could get them right anyway by magic,' Millie told me, 'if he wasn't too lazy to learn how.... But the thing that really annoys me is the way he never bothers to learn a person's name. If a person isn't important to him, he always forgets their name.' When Millie said this, I realized that Christopher had never once forgotten my name.

I spent a lot of time playing in miserable places that were not a lot of fun. Somebody once said it is character building and I was like: My character is just fine.

Usually when I'm trying to establish character, I try and find out where they live.

Nightclub City tells the behind-the-scenes story of Manhattan's glamorous nightlife at its peak. Packed with colorful characters, terrific original research, and an unusually accessible writing style, Nightclub City is a gritty social history of America's most glitzy fantasies.

for me the most fun of my career is to bring a little bit of irreverence to characters. And, you know, I don't think that the producers were expecting me to be as irreverent as I am.

It can be difficult to be subtle and not cartoony in prosthetics. But when you see characters like Bubbles and Desiree from 'Little Britain' on screen, it makes all the hard work worth it. It's such fun watching those transformations.

In order to get the things I want, it helps me to pretend I’m a figure in a daytime drama, a schemer. Soap opera characters make emphatic pronouncements. They ball up their fists and state their goals out loud. ‘I will destroy Buchanan Enterprises,’ they say. ‘Phoebe Wallingford will pay for what she’s done to our family.’ Walking home with the back half of the twelve-foot ladder, I turned to look in the direction of Hugh’s loft. ‘You will be mine,’ I commanded.

Donald Trump's temperament and character is precisely what you would hate to see in your children, much less your president.

I'm a music storyteller and collaborator. I hear character, location, and story as music. For me a score is there to both heighten the story and to actually tell the story with the unique emotional and narrative powers of music.

As I started to read nonfiction in the mid '70s, I discovered, holy cow, there was a lot of imaginative nonfiction. Not the kind where people use composite characters and invented quotes. I hate that kind of nonfiction. But imaginative in the sense that good writing and unexpected structure and vivid reporting could be combined with presenting facts.

The best leaders are apt to be found among those executives who have a strong component of unorthodoxy in their character. Instead of resisting innovation, they symbolize it.

There is no such thing as character other than the habitual action, as Mr. Aristotle told us two thousand years ago.

I was attempting to write the story of my life. It wasn't so much about plot. It was much more about character.

Many biblical passages teach that we're not saved by our own efforts but by the grace of God alone. But the same passages also tell us good works are an essential evidence of the salvation experience. We're not saved by good works, but for good works. It begins with God's grace, and it's sustained by his grace as you shape your character by what you do as you cross the bridge.

One of my first gigs was as a guest star, and I was supposed to be a big imposing character.