Character Quotes - Page 474

The recipe for any character is always very interesting, as far as what doses of certain qualities you want.

You shoot this and it always has something of yourself - sometimes it's more and sometimes it's less. I think after the shooting it depends on who your character is. You definitely learn something about yourself, or you get to know sides that you knew you had, but you had never activated or triggered in a way that allowed you to let them out. Bad and good, all of this is in all of us. But you definitely meet another side or a quarter or ten percent of yourself that you had an idea of, but never really knew about.

By the time I was a teenager, there wasn't a show I hadn't inhaled or a character I hadn't met.

I had no idea Savage Season was the beginning of a series. I wrote the second one about three years later. The character of Hap wouldn't stop talking to me, and then there was a third, and over the years nine novels and a collection of stories and some uncollected stories.

I am constantly getting letters from inconsistancies in the back stories of these characters.

The advice that I usually give to young actors is that if you can create a character for the stage and keep that character fresh for at least 6 months that means you're doing the show eight times a week.

I think the thing is with a movie that has this much science fiction in it; you need characters who are more science fact, if you know what I mean, than they are human.

In novels you're able to occupy character's internal thoughts and it's really hard to do in a film or a TV show. When you're reading a character's thoughts or when it's in first person, you're reading kind of their own story, so you have the opportunity to see what makes that character complex or complicated. And to me that's what the whole point of fiction is.

I always feel super uncomfortable when it's like ah, there probably has to be a sex scene. I feel really bad and then always look around to see if anyone is watching me while I'm writing. I want to apologize to people who have to read those sex scenes, but I feel like it's part of the characters life, it's important.

I wouldn't be surprised if some day, they put the Simpsons in the Smithsonian. It's become part of our culture, those characters.

I watched so many comic book movies where the actors weren't as built as the characters in the book. It made me mad because they didn't look right.

I play characters who are comfortable naked, but that's something you work up to. I did a play off-Broadway in New York when I was in college. It was full-frontal nudity. It's nerve-racking.

What do you do in a novel? You take recognizable characters from your own life, and you fantasize about what they're really like.

When I went to the University of Iowa in order to be a writer, I thought, This is the worst way to learn how to write. To sit in a room with a bunch of would-be writers, who want to write the Great American Novel, every one of them, and you read their stories and they read yours, and you're not living a life. I don't like that. I like learning on the job. The character of my work has definitely evolved from the character of my life.

I'm not suggesting at all that we take away all of the characters' vices. I am suggesting that this particular vice is so insidious, so nefarious, and so deadly that simply by glamorizing it or poisoning our young adults, and I think it's a very separate category, but in no way am I suggesting that we move on from banning smoking in movies to banning drinking, you know, or whatever else we want to do.

I've sort of closed my mind off to reality shows: I just don't watch them, don't care about them, don't know who the characters are, but they're all in general usage.

I have always liked kind of outsider characters. In the movies I grew up liking, you had more complicated characters. I don't mean that in a way that makes us better or anything. I just seem to like characters who don't really fit into. You always hear that from the studio: "You have to be able to root for them, they have to be likeable, and the audience has to be able to see themselves in the characters." I feel that's not necessarily true. As long as the character has some type of goal or outlook on the world, or perspective, you can follow that story.

As an actor, I'm always playing solitary characters. But as a director, I'm always making ensemble movies, which focus on lots of people's lives and how they intertwine.

With 'Taxi Driver,' I had this eureka moment. I realized that acting could be much more than what I had been doing. I had to build a character that wasn't me.

I don't have to live the lives of my characters to write about them. It's about really putting yourself in their shoes.

Even though I don't write about things that come from my life because I'm lucky, and I live in a great place with great kids and, you know, a great husband, I think you can find threads of me in the characters, so that's really what being a writer is, probably.

Talking out loud to fictional characters is just the tip of the iceberg.

If you read a book that's fiction and you get caught in the characters and the plot, and swept away, really, by the fiction of it - by the non-reality - you sometimes wind up changing your reality as well. Often, when the last page is turned, it will haunt you.

You see so many earnest characters in movies all the time, everyone has a purpose.

I still have a hard time saying who Johnny [ Cash ] is in one sentence. He seemed so contradictory in his actions, and I think that's probably what is most fascinating about him and what made him such an interesting character to study.