Character Quotes - Page 486

The dark book has been terribly popular. Dark characters, dysfunction, and all sorts of things from reality that are true in our world.

I think there are a lot more relationship scenes in my movies that people tend to overlook. A lot of scenes really feel real and are about the characters.

People can rock together, people can do great things together, and that's what you love when you're working with characters and it's all going well.

I think there's grays in characters if you look at all the great characters, those characters that have those layers of being good and being bad and what's the struggle. It's always more interesting to watch.

To be the leading man it's about the celebrity and the looks, and it's tough to do that. People who do it great are people like Tom Cruise and Will Smith - they're built for that. I ain't. I'm more of a character guy.

If you get a show named after you, and then play another character, that's fine. But if you do a show that's an ensemble show like... MASH, then you're in trouble.

If I could play any character from the book though it’d be Church. Who wouldn’t want to be a cat?!

TV is a big business. In some ways, it's surpassed films, in terms of the way people invest in these shows and invest in these characters, and give up so much of their time to follow these people's stories.

I'm not that much of a researcher. I'm good at channeling characters, and I'm good at structure.

In a great play or a great film, there's a rehearsal period and they find this character. On TV, everything moves fast.

I think you always want to be open to things... it's just the matter of finding something I believe in, finding a character I believe in, and I think that's the way it should always be. I'm looking for things that excite me.

Feature-length film comedy is harder to pull off than the episodic sitcom - it doesn't have the same factory machinery up and running, teams of writers putting familiar characters through permutations - but that doesn't explain the widening quality gap that makes movie humor look like a genetic defective.

I did a lot of work with early 20th century attitudes, the kind of superficial notions and behavior that prompt people who don't know history very well to think that "people were different back then" - but beneath all that are characters who react in ways that we can all recognize, and will always be able to recognize.

Understand, my own politics aren't necessarily interchangeable with what any of my characters believe. You could take each of the characters in On the Ropes, and I'd probably be in sympathy with a different one on any given day, depending on what's going on in the world.

I have a gut reaction to stuff that I read. Either it's a filmmaker that I really want to work with, or it's a story that I really want to be a part of and help serve, or there's a character that I feel I can bring something unique to. That's really what it's about. I would go crazy, if I just relied on the same tricks and did the same thing, all the time. It was just be no fun, at all. I really do need to try something different, every time out, and do something that scares me, a little bit.

I am myself for a living. I don't animate a character.

Children develop character by what they see, by what they hear, and by what they are repeatedly led to do.

It's always fun to try something new, and to play a new character, and it's fun to play another period.

I can remember the time I would get my scripts and spent the entire weekend breaking them down and playing with them, and putting a lot of work into them, trying to bring the character to life, and to make interesting choices. It was one of the things to me that told me that I needed to change things up a little bit, because to me, I felt the passion was lacking from some of my performances.

A nature wise With finding in itself the types of all, With watching from the dim verge of the time What things to be are visible in the gleams Thrown forward on them from the luminous past, Wise with the history of its own frail heart, With reverence and sorrow, and with love, Broad as the world, for freedom and for man.

All that hath been majestical In life or death, since time began, Is native in the simple heart of all, The angel heat of man.

One of the things particularly admirable in the public utterances of President Lincoln is a certain tone of familiar dignity, which, while it is perhaps the most difficult attainment of mere style, is also no doubtful indication of personal character. There must be something essentially noble in an elective ruler who can descend to the level of confidential ease without forfeiting respect, something very manly in one who can break through the etiquette of his conventional rank and trust himself to the reason and intelligence of those who have elected him.

Any good actor is a character actor.

Character is not the enemy of self-expression and personal freedom, it is their necessary precondition.

Sometimes you'll see interviews about an actor who was asked to hit the weight room to develop his body for the character, and you hear them complaining about the egg white omelettes they had to eat and the tortures of hitting the gym twice a day - I find that to be a bit saddening, it's all a part of becoming the character and as an actor, that is your job.