Character Quotes - Page 506

In the old days, I just could not leave characters alone. Now I just try to keep the ones that still have something in the way of stories to tell.

Whichever character I'm using and wherever I am in my mind dictates what kind of story I'm going to tell.

I notice a lot of younger artists have difficulty telling stories. They might have short stories where they express themselves well, but they don't really know how to tell stories with characters. That craft just passed them by.

Anyone could identify with the human aspect of the characters.

I've known gay people - men and women - since I was a young person. To me it's just naturalistic and realistic to portray gay characters in a humanistic light. As a young man, I knew enough gay people as people not to fear them. On the other side of the coin, I like to irritate conservatives and homophobes.

I get to draw what I like to draw, basically people hangin' around, and write very humanistic kinds of situations and characters. But I do also like to draw adventure stories - more in terms of drawing them than writing them - and letting my imagination go wild.

When some English moralists write about the importance of having character, they appear to mean only the importance of having a dull character.

The oligarchic character of the modern English commonwealth does not rest, like many oligarchies, on the cruelty of the rich to the poor. It does not even rest on the kindness of the rich to the poor. It rests on the perennial and unfailing kindness of the poor to the rich.

Very few people in the world would care to listen to the real defense of their own characters. The real defense, the defense which belongs to the Day of Judgment, would make such damaging admissions, would clear away so many artificial virtues, would tell such tragedies of weakness and failure, that a man would sooner be misunderstood and censured by the world than exposed to that awful and merciless eulogy.

I believe life experiences are what an actor needs to relate to the character roles they take on, and to say the least, I've had many experiences leading up to this moment. Not only have my experiences become a tremendous asset in my acting, but also they helped me discover who I am and who I want to be.

I like to always wash the slate clean, and reinvigorate my spirit to be connected to the characters that I am doing. I am finding new ways to allow myself to soar beyond the parameters of what the writers have written. My key is to commit, and love your character.

What helps me is yogic breathing, dropping my spiritual level where I am really, really clear that I am playing a character.

Well, with each character that I play in my life as an actor, I try to figure out how to find the challenge.

I think many people have contradictions to them and I love characters that deal with those contradictions.

When I listen to my scene partners and listen to their breathing allows me to be connected to them in scenes. I am not trying to multi task, not trying to talk on the phone, but in my character.

I never like to refer back to anything I've done when I'm working on a character, even if that character has the same occupation.

When you have great acting partners, you hope that your reaction to them is propels you deeper into your own character.

Many times - especially when I'm playing an historical character - I want to be really on target with how I create that character and really nuanced with who that human being might be. But I don't want to lose the likeness of me or the depth of my own personality. So meditation and my spirituality has helped me to realize that, yes, I want to get out of the way but I also want the ability to hold on to what the audience likes of what they see of me.

If I can look at each character that I am given and create them in a different way from the last role, I'm happy.

There is no pulse so sure of the state of a nation as its characteristic art product which has nothing to do with its material life.

It is hard living down the tempers we are born with. We all begin well, for in our youth there is nothing we are more intolerant of than our own sins writ large in others and we fight them fiercely in ourselves; but we grow old and we see that these our sins are of all sins the really harmless ones to own, nay that they give a charm to any character, and so our struggle with them dies away.

The kind of loving women and men have in them and the ways it comes out from them makes for them the bottom nature in them, gives to them their kind of thinking, makes the character they have all their living in them, makes them then their kind of women and men and there are always many millions made of each kind of them.

genius must ever be imperfect. Life is not long enough nor slow enough for both brain and character to grow side by side to superhuman proportions.

It took me years to learn that character is fate and that no one can be made over.

I don't know if I could [do a TV show]. I would if it had nothing to do with the comic. It would be really weird and maybe not feature any of The Umbrella Academy characters.