Character Quotes - Page 520

I'm just trying to write a good story, strictly from imagination. People just think it's random, they don't see the rewriting, phrasing of characters, choosing the words, bringing the world to light in which the characters live in. That creates an illusion that this is real.

There's a ton of potential to do something absolutely loopy with a world that you create and characters that you are literally surgically constructing.

It's a sad indication of where Washington has come, where policy differences almost necessarily become questions of integrity. I came to Washington in the late '70s, and people had the ability in the past to have intense policy differences but didn't feel the need to question the other person's character.

I'm not going to let people who work in the United States Department of Justice have their characters be assailed without any basis.

Resistance, whether to one's appetites or to the ways of the world, is a chief factor in the shaping of character.

In general, I enjoy athletes who have a strong character who let their abilities speak for themselves.

When I was younger, when I was a teenager, the work was more satirical and funny and cartoony. And part of it was chops - if you have a more limited repertoire of stick figures and cartoon characters, they lend themselves more to humor than to tragedy.

Definitely the script because you want to be part of an interesting story, you want your character to be a challenge, then comes the director. But essentially it's the script first and whether it's a character that you think you can do.

If you can jump up onstage and make people laugh, shouldn't you also be able to inhabit a character?

I don't like to come at my character from some really technical place.

The more I love the character, the harder it is to get it wrong. I have to get to a point that I can speak for them.

It's always hard but the reality is, especially in my case, that every time I go to work I have to do it so it's become part of the job. It's an extra challenge but it's also quite often another extra tool that you have to really think consciously about getting into the character. So while it does require more work, it's maybe even an advantage to a degree because it forces you to switch, to consciously have to jump into and out of the character.

The stories that I like to tell and the movies I like are always grounded in the emotional arc of the characters.

I'm not a very good actor, so I break character all the time.

Remember that you are an actor in a play, and that the Playwright chooses the manner of it: If he wants you to act a poor man you must act the part with all your powers; and so if your part be a cripple or a magistrate or a plain man. For your business is to act the character that is given you and act it well. The choice of the cast is Another's.

To adorn our characters by the charm of an amiable nature shows at once a lover of beauty and a lover of man.

It is very grand and sumptuous and awesome to look at but it was really about the characters for me.

I always think I could do better. I always think that something could be more perfect, but I think that that's just within my nature. I think I want to please a director, I want to give my everything and find every which way I could have burrowed further into a character.

I don't see my old films, but I think of the characters I played as friends, like the women I meet in my life who made strong impressions on me. I remember them and they are part of me.

For me, I don't feel it is a success in the career to be the pretty woman; career success comes from being characters who tell us something about the truth.

There are a lot of films where I play characters that are about the windows to the interior person rather than the exterior.

What I find difficult about photo shoots is the line between playing a character - you're being asked by the photographer to take on a role like you would in a movie - and being a fancier version of yourself. It's about finding that line between being spontaneous and open to direction, but also trying to explain to photographers that the "me" is often taken out of context because it has all of this other stuff attached to it.

I love people like Renée Zellweger who aren't afraid to look unattractive and really put themselves into a character role and to really be an actress instead of just thinking "Am I on-screen pouting and looking beautiful?" because that's not really what it's about.

I think Skeeter even says that when she calls up Miss Stein. "No one asked Mammy how she feels in Gone With The Wind." Mammy wasn't really much of a fleshed-out character. She was just kind of there to take care of Miss Scarlett.

My dream is to be a character in a Wes Anderson movie. I just love how interesting and eclectic and stylized his characters are, and I would love to dive into that world.