Character Quotes - Page 369

Any excuse for non-performance, no matter how valid, weakens character.

A doctrine-teaching, character-building university, the Brigham Young University is dedicated to the building of character and faith, for character is higher than intellect . . . . We are men of God first, men of letters second, men of science third, and noted men fourth, men of rectitude rather than academic competence. . . . Our academic training must be as impeccable as our lives.

I've just finished reading a book about the brilliant Margaret Rutherford. She wasn't a beauty, but inside she was absolutely blazing and passionate about her work. She's one of those life-affirming characters.

We do not judge men by what they are in themselves, but by what they are relatively to us.

Impassioned characters never attain their mark till they have overshot it.

I love all my characters. I love their weaknesses and flaws. I feel like they're all my best friends and I adore being with them.

As Baudelaire said it so beautifully, Emma Bovary is an androgynous character. She cannot be reduced to a gender or a sociological type. She represents something bigger than herself. That was the genius of Flaubert: the ability to combine the general and the particular.

I don't want to be known for anything other than the fact that I play characters in movies.

I live in New York, and Clara lives in Recife. The character is Brazilian, and as I read the script, I felt like Kleber [Mendonca] had been spying on me in order to create this role [in Aquarius]. Clara and I have different backgrounds. I come from an intuitive world, and she's an academic, but when we got together, we really became one. There are many times when I'm watching the film where Clara will say something, and I will find myself agreeing with her. It was the first time that I had this weird sensation that the character I played is so me, but yet it's so her.

To create tension, dialogue needs to be stretched out. That is, characters should not be immediately responsive.

Sure, kids want to read whatever is the hot book, and of course they want to read fantasy and any kind of speculative fiction, but they also like to read stories with kids that look just like them, that have the same problems as them. And I've noticed that what they particularly want to see is to see those characters prevail. So they don't want sanitized situations. They want stories to be raw, they want them to be gritty, but they also do want to see the hope at the end of the story.

When I say myself, I don't mean just as a woman of color, as a girl who's growing up in the Bronx, as people growing up in some way economically-challenged, not growing up with money. It was also even just the way we spoke. The vernacular. I learned that it's alright to say "ain't." My characters can speak the way they authentically are, and that makes for good story. It's not making for good story to make them speak proper English when nobody speaks like that on the playground.

Okay, this is Fran Lebowitz. She gave an interview once for the Paris Review about trying to write fiction and saying that fiction writers start talking about how characters are talking to them, and it's crazy, she's never had that. And I also thought, I'm never gonna be able to do this, because I didn't feel that for a really long time.

It's a whole other way of working when you work in films: You know exactly the arc of your character.

You relate to a character and you find that character within yourself. It's all parts of me. I don't leave characters behind. I just let them go.

In effect, painting is the still memory of [the artist's] human motion, and our individual responses to it depend on who we are, on our character, which underlines the simple truth that no person leaves himself behind in order to look at a painting.

Some characters are like some bodies in chemistry; very good, perhaps, in themselves, yet fly off and refuse the least conjunction with each other.

So research is a terribly imperfect science, and you learn an awful lot more after you've published a book, because people keep writing to you and saying, 'Oh, gosh, I was related to such and such a character and I have a letter in my possession.'

Athens is the birthplace of modern tragedy. In the Greek tragic plays, the tableau of the characters would become a statue, like the statue of Oedipus reaching up to the Gods with blood spilling out of his eyes. I love the way the Greeks would immortalize experience. Things that all of us feel.

I never got really into Twitter until more recently when I started doing the Dirt Nasty thing, and created that other character. I think it's almost essential now. I don't think Leonardo DiCaprio necessarily needs to do it, but someone like me, who's somewhere in the middle of nowhere and a shitstack, I need to do that.

The biggest challenge is not the storytelling, it's to track every character's arc through the entire movie.

I love con-men characters in film.

Virtue herself is her own fairest reward.

I actually think the reason I am interested in certain parts is because I was such a dweeb in high school. When you are such a loser, it's a helpful way in to a lot of characters because even very powerful people are not all that powerful really. They all had a high school. That vulnerability is completely permanent and, as an actor, it's a good thing.

It's rather rare when you play an older character in a movie in a supporting role to even get an arc.