Character Quotes - Page 509

I have always considered The Merry Wives one of the worst plays, if not altogether the worst, that Shakespeare has left us. The wit for the most part is dreary or foolish; the tone is coarse and farcical; and the characters want the fine distinctive touches he so well knew how to give. If some luckless wight had written such a comedy in our time, I should like to see what the critics would say to it?

No-one knows what I do in my private, spare time, so I don't see why anyone would assume I'm celibate or somehow turning into a Garboesque character.

John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola and Oliver Stone - those guys are consummate filmmakers. They believe that you don't talk it, you show it. So when I find a role now, I try to find a visual way to tell what the character is about rather than trying to speak about it.

Woody [Allen] is a fascinating character to be around. You don't really know what he's going to want. You're on your toes, but you're on your heels too, if you know what I mean.

There's so many characters they [studios] are not letting me play. And I thought, "Why don't you just go produce it yourself?".

Human judgment is notoriously fallible and perhaps seldom more so than in facile decisions that a character has no adaptive significance because we do not know the use of it.

There are characters which are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them. Their susceptibilities will clash against objects that remain innocently quiet.

If we need a true conception of the popular character to guide our sympathies rightly, we need it equally to check our theories, and direct us in their application.

But I think it is hardly an argument against a man's general strength of character, that he should be apt to be mastered by love. A fine constitution doesn't insure one against small-pox or any other of those inevitable diseases. A man may be very firm in other matters, and yet be under a sort of witchery from a woman.

I believe that ideal character in its perfection is potentially in every man who is born into the world.

I think our failure in the production of good town churches of distinctive character must have struck you often, as it has me, when contrasted with our comparative success in country churches.

An absolutely different and distinctive character.

The idea that every time you do a film you're supposed to be tortured confuses me. I mean, guys who say "Oh, it's really tough, my character is really suffering" - come on. For us, even in the rotten ones, we've had a good time. I don't think you have to suffer.

The people I've respected most in the industry over the years - Paul Newman, for instance. I just loved the way he handled growing old on-screen. It's understanding that you're now basically a character actor.

What a man is depends on his character; but what he does, and what we think of what he does, depends on his circumstances.

It has taken me nearly twenty years of studied self-restraint, aided by the natural decay of my faculties, to make myself dull enough to be accepted as a serious person by the British public; and I am not sure that I am not still regarded as a suspicious character in some quarters.

I've never been able to reuse characters, I've often wanted to. I've never been able to get people to cooperate. I can't get anyone together on any kind of deal.

The first glance at History convinces us that the actions of men proceed from their needs, their passions, their characters and talents; and impresses us with the belief that such needs, passions and interests are the sole spring of actions.

The soul is presupposed as a ready-made agent, which displays such features as its acts and utterances, from which we can learn what it is, what sort of faculties and powers it possesses -- all without being aware that the act and utterance of what the soul is really invests it with that character in our conception and makes it reach a higher stage of being than it explicitly had before.

There is something in the character of every man which cannot be broken in--the skeleton of his character; and to try to alter this is like training a sheep for draught purposes.

Characters who experience great trauma will sometimes create an escape.

I was never a leading man. I've always been in the outer concentric circles in the company, being a character actor, which is a good place to be. It gives you that diversity.

I want to do character driven epic storylines with Throne of Atlantis kicking off.

We always knew that we wanted to keep Atlantis off for a while and when it did show up, to make it a big story. The goal for Aquaman was to position him as an A-list character; position him as an important member of the Justice League.

Re-introducing Aquaman and getting him to a place like that and then ultimately having him headline a Justice League storyline that crosses over between his book and Justice League really is the culmination of where we've been going with the character since the beginning. His role in this will change the Justice League storyline, it will change him, and it will send them both in new directions.