Character Quotes - Page 383

The buried code of many American films has become: If I kill you, I have won and you have lost. The instinctive ethical code of traditional Hollywood, the code by which characters like James Stewart, John Wayne and Henry Fonda lived, has been lost.

I started doing standup when I was in college, and I would incorporate a lot of characters into my act.

I enjoy playing evil, but not one-dimensional evil characters. I like the ebbs and cracks in the armor.

And as a director, you constantly try to solve problems, so you have to focus on that. You take away all the other parts. Of course, when the shot finishes, you remember that you have Robert De Niro in front of you. But when you're shooting, you just see a character in front of you, and an actor, and you try to search for very truthful moments. That's what obsesses you.

The order of ... successive generations is indeed much more clearly proved than many a legend which has assumed the character of history in the hands of man; for the geological record is the work of God.

I tend to plan as I write. And I want to leave myself open and the character open to keep on going until it seems to be the time to stop.

I like naming characters.

The best way to reveal a character is to get them to open their mouths.

The music industry is such a huge machine. There are still a lot of good people in it, but the character of the industry and the culture of the industry is very fast.

Heterosexual women ask questions that are a lot to do with what I did to my body and what that was like to lose all that weight and so on. To me it just reveals that that's a preoccupation of theirs. Or gay women have been really keen on knowing how I felt about playing a gay character and have often wanted to talk about their own experiences with children. Straight men have often shown some sense of relief, that they get to experience the philanderer as a woman and not have to judge her in the same way. That's fascinating to me.

Im not one of those authors who claims to hear voices in my head or let the characters speak through me, whatever that might mean.

Our minds are shaped by the books we read. Our characters, by the people we meet. Our spirits by the love we give.

Sow a character, you reap your destiny.

Every writer knows a lot more about their characters and story than actually makes it onto the page.

To be honest, I don't think of any of my characters as minor characters - they're all the main characters in a story that I don't necessarily get to tell.

Everybody has felt at one time or another that everyone else in the world had a better shot than they did, so when you engage that, you engage the reader, and I think you create a character that brings the reader more fully into the story.

When you are writing, you have to love all your characters. If you're writing something from a minor character's point of view, you really need to stop and say the purpose of this character isn't to be somebody's sidekick or to come in and put the horse in the stable. The purpose of this character is you're getting a little window into that character's life and that character's day. You have to write them as if they're not a minor character, because they do have their own things going on.

Clarity is not a characteristic of the human spirit.

Every man makes his own summer. The season has no character of its own, unless one is a farmer with a professional concern for the weather.

This is one of the cruelties of the theatre of life; we all think of ourselves as stars and rarely recognize it when we are indeed mere supporting characters or even supernumeraries.

Of all the stars whom I worked with, I think Steve knew better what worked for him on the screen than any other. He had such a sense of what he could register, and that helped a lot in terms of shaping the character and the script.

I'm such a product of my media diet... it's interesting that you say what I do is observational. It's observational as far as it goes - to the extent that I observe media closely. Kriota might have a better sense of this. I don't always have the best sense of how human nature works, but I certainly know how to dismantle representations of characters.

The characters have desperation and it doesn't work out for everyone. Maybe it's not fair because I'm responding to the adaptations that smooth out the edges.

I like films about people who figured out what they believed and had the guts to act on it in a way that added value to others. So, there are lots of movies that have characters who did that. I'll pick an odd one - Stranger Than Fiction because I really liked the movie - particularly the offbeat cookie maker. You'll have to see the movie to see what I mean. The movie also reinforces that you can be the author of your own script.

Since the death of Nikola Tesla in 1943, his life has deserved a worthy biography. Bernard Carlson has delivered that in Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age, which portrays Tesla as intensely human. . . . Anyone, whether simply an interested reader or a professional historian, engineer, or physicist, will finish Tesla with a deepened understanding of his world, character, and accomplishments.