Character Quotes - Page 399

I usually have a location and then I put the character there. I love place names. I think I'm tricking myself by being so specific - it suddenly becomes real to me. Just because I say it's Chicago, Illinois doesn't mean it's true, but place names sort of make me grounded and then I can put some people there.

Lot of stories in deceit, how characters deceive other people, but most of all, I think, how they deceive themselves. We're not as tricky as we think we are.

My characters tend to be people who are looking back on a life lived, their joys, their regrets.

I used to be surprised and a little annoyed when characters would reappear in my mind, itching to be in another story. Now I realize it's part of the deal, that you create these people out of thin air but then, if you do it right, they actually live.

To me, and I'm sure for other writers, too, characters come back and they relive again, but what about those characters who only live for a page or two? Or for five pages or 10 pages. I like to think they're still out there - still living - but for me they kind of die, too. It's kind of sad. I don't think about them anymore unless I give them life again.

I don't like the way some actors, when playing a nasty character, will try to grab hold of something good about them.

Acting is about covering up traces of who you are and just being the character. I think it's easier to accept people in roles if you don't know a lot about them.

I think one's character on the athletic field does not have to have anything to do with the way they are in real life.

People would stop me in the street - my demographic tends to be the elderly Jewish women from Miami; I think they tend to fancy me as someone that would've been good with their daughter or something - and a lot of them will do the wrist-slapping thing. "Oh, you're a terrible man! Just terrible!" And I'm, like, "Well, it's just a show. I'm just playing a character."

I certainly have played a lot of strong characters, and I love playing a strong character.

My job as a dramatist is to find out where these characters want to go, and make it as hard as possible for them to get there.

The start of a film is like a gateway, a formal entrance-point. The first three minutes of a film make great demands on an audience's patience and credulity. A great deal has to be learnt very rapidly about place and attitude, character and intent and ambition.

Michael Bohn provides a rare opportunity to experience the American sporting scene in the Roaring Twenties. A constant stream of legendary characters marches across these pages. You’ll meet them all: The Babe, The Four Horsemen, The Manassa Manassas Mauler, The Wheaton Iceman, Bill Tilden, Gertrude Ederle, and Grantland Rice, the sportswriter whose purple prose made them all come alive.

Quality of character doesn't make a leader, but the lack of it flaws the entire process.

By themselves, character and integrity do not accomplish anything. But their absence faults everything else.

In every analysis you need to isolate what the real assets are and you must not forget to examine the franchise to do business, to review the character and competence of the management and to estimate the outcome if the whole business had to be turned into cash.

One has to be able to twist and change and distort characters, play with them like clay, so everything fits together. Real people don't permit you to do that.

I never base characters on real people. There are people who do that but I really don't know how to do it.

The first movie I literally ever made in my life was about two guys playing Stratego with each other. I had all my friends dressing up like the military characters in the game. So 'Battleship' is really my second board game turned movie!

There are so many characters whizzing around inside my head, it's like Looney Tunes. But as soon as I've finished writing about them, I completely forget who they are.

London has always provided the landscape for my imagination. It becomes a character - a living being - within each of my books.

I like playing characters that are complex, that are intriguing, that come from left field, that do things that are unexpected. I don't like people who just follow one line and that's it - that's why I could never be in a sitcom, I don't think. They're not intriguing enough for me.

Whatever may be his true and final destination, there is a spirit within him at enmity with nothingness and dissolution. This is the character of all life and being.

Mankind, transmitting from generation to generation the legacy of accumulated vengeances, and pursuing with the feelings of duty the misery of their fellow-beings, have not failed to attribute to the Universal Cause a character analogous with their own. The image of this invisible, mysterious Being is more or less excellent and perfect — resembles more or less its original — in proportion to the perfection of the mind on which it is impressed.

I am drawn to characters that go on journeys, characters that are real people, that have life.