The less you offer, the more readers are forced to bring the world to life with their own visual imaginings. I personally hate an illustration of a character on a jacket of a book. I never want to have someone show me what the character really looks like - or what some artist has decided the character really looks like - because it always looks wrong to me. I realize that I prefer to kind of meet the text halfway and offer a lot of visual collaborations from my own imaginative response to the sentences.
However appalling to consider, however tedious to enact, every novel requires furniture, whether it is to be named or unnamed, for the characters will be unable to remain in standing position for the duration of the story.
You don’t have the slightest idea of what it means to write a scene and a character in the English language, with images and words chock full of received meaning.
When Rolling Stone handed me this crazy assignment to be in the studio with James Brown, they had the misapprehension that I'd written for them already just because I claimed my character had.
As an actor, you get to sort of bounce back and forth in terms of the age range you play and the life experience that your characters have.
I was attached to star in a project that was going to be an unbelievable character piece, to be showcased all over the world. It was everything I had been working toward and had suffered for. I had two months to prep and pretty much bankrupted myself in the process. A week before I was supposed to get on the plane, the whole project fell apart. Not only did it leave me completely broke and out of work, but I felt as if I had been betrayed by acting. Acting is not just something I love but a part of who I am. I was shattered. Thankfully, the love of those around me helped push me forward.
I would rather portray the hero, if it's a really great film. All my favorite fictional film characters are heroes, such as in "The Last of the Mohicans" and "Robin Hood."
I like films, I like movies, I like playing different characters and working with different actors, and filming in different places. I like movies, because it's kind of a combination of every art, it's like it's picture, it's story, it's music, it's kind of like a clash and a collide of every art. It's really neat.
Often times, if a character is pretty straightforward, he or she is not as interesting to portray.
I try to write things that can't be made into movies. My novels have thwarted many attempts to film them and I think that was true of the essay, too. If you'd actually tried to be true to the essay, it would have been, perhaps, boring. So taking that narrow little cast of characters and expanding it out, that was what was exciting about the project for me.
I only work with actors who take full responsibility for their characters.
A Thousand Pardons began at the beginning. I wanted it to be one continuous, almost breathless kind of story. In order to do that, it's really hard not to begin at the beginning. There's such a chain of consequence to everything that happens to main characters - it's very hard to break it apart and still be able to hold the plot in your head.
That's a long way of saying no, I'm always too bound up in thinking about the characters in whatever I'm working on and trying to make good to dwell on characters from previous books.
I very easily decide in certain situations that I'm an outsider. That's just my own craziness. I think that I have sympathy for those characters who are like that, but I love it when the humor comes from a character who is serious about his situation - only the way he's thinking about it is all wrong, or the ways he's solving his problems are never going to work.
An abundance of Twitter users believe they can troll and rant with impunity, no matter how debasing or even threatening their 140-character posts pose.
I do like when you find a true personal relationship with any of the characters, you like to make that honest connection. And every once in a while, there's that glimmer where you got that line in where something happens, where you get to really talk.
I always liked those characters in 'True Blood' who could turn into animals. I'd love to be an animal of some kind and run quickly through a forest.
When you do your comedy and your drama, your acting style doesn't change. If it's a comedy, the situations and the characters might be a little funnier, but you're just trying to be honest.
I realized I never played a character that was skilled at anything, or skilled at anything that I couldn't become skilled at.
I'm very, very attracted to morally ambiguous characters, not just pure bad guys or pure good guys.
As a writer, I haven't delved into dramatic writing. As an actor, I could always, even more so than comedy, do drama. When you do your comedy and your drama, your acting style doesn't change. If it's a comedy, the situations and the characters might be a little funnier, but you're just trying to be honest.
The hardest thing for me to do, and the best thing I've done and learned as an actor is to sacrifice being funny in certain circumstances in order to do something that makes sense for the story or the character, or emotionally.
I was very conscious of race as I was writing. I was lucky to have spent real time in Portuguese Africa, but I am white and my main characters are white, outsiders at sea in the "Dark Continent."
It's grown into a personal relationship, yeah. I'm crazy about Jerry. I think he's a unique character.
There is no such thing as an impartial jury because there are no impartial people. There are people that argue on the web for hours about who their favorite character on 'Friends' is.
