Character Quotes - Page 527

I might refer at once, if necessary, to a hundred well authenticated instances. One of very remarkable character, and of which the circumstances may be fresh in the memory of some of my readers, occurred, not very long ago, in the neighboring city of Baltimore, where it occasioned a painful, intense, and widely extended excitement.

There are few persons, even among the calmest thinkers, who have not occasionally been startled into a vague yet thrilling half credence in the supernatural, by coincidences of so seemingly marvellous a character that, as mere coincidences, the intellect has been unable to receive them.

The critiques I received from my father's community didn't actually have to do with any of the things I'd been afraid of - spiritual or cultural aspects - they were more annoyed that I'd killed off this character or those characters hadn't hooked up or I'd done an open ending and it didn't give them a sense of closure that they were expecting.

Holland is very good at avant garde, probably due to the Dutch character. Good at design. Experimentation sometimes works here very well.

The trick to acting is not to show off, it's to think the thoughts of the character.

I have friends who are leading men, and they're only ever allowed to play leading men of a certain type. But as a character actor, there's a wider variety of projects available. On the big Hollywood films, all they care about is having their lead in place, so it's actually easier for someone like me to slip in. And I'm happy to do so.

I've never played a gay character on screen, so that would be interesting. I've never played a gay character, and that would fascinate me because I'm not gay, so that would interest me.

When I think of character actors, I think of Spencer Tracy; I think of Gene Hackman, Robert Duvall. When I was a young lad watching films, my eyes were on them - watching 'On the Waterfront,' my eyes are on Rod Steiger and Karl Malden, not on Brando.

With a face like mine, I'm never going to play a character who conquers the universe, I'm going to play characters who are subject to forces bearing down on them. My career's based on how we are rather than how we wish we were - they get the good-looking boys in for that kind of role.

The trick to acting is not to show off; it's to think the thoughts of the character. I was lucky because when I started acting, it was doing jobs above pubs. I learned to act in anonymity, so by the time people saw me, I knew what I was doing. I was crap for years, but no one saw me being crap. It's a trade you learn.

I'm the guy who plays human beings. I understand why the characters are doing what they're doing. When you play a villain, you don't play a villain: you play a human being doing what he thinks he needs to do to get what he wants.

I felt audiences are happier to take comedy people who play darker people because there's a link between the psychosis of comedy and the psychosis of being a twisted character.

Im a pretty good judge of character.

When I'm putting the character together I try to find music that I think fits the character.

In the theater the audience is generally riveted to a single angle of observation. The movie director, though, can rapidly shift from objective to subjective--and to any number of subjective points of view--and in so doing seem to pull the audience directly inside the frame of his picture, giving the spectator the sense of experiencing an action from the viewpoint of a participant. Identification of the viewer with the film character, then, can be much more intimate than the analogous situation in the theater.

I know that all cops are not sterling characters. But you have to have someone to root for. I balance it with rotten cops who will take a bribe, who will beat somebody up.

The biggest thing that comes out of improv that gets built on is just character traits. You know, for me the singing was born out of improv.

When you're playing a fictional character reacting to the real world, it's incredibly difficult and confusing and kind of messes with your values a bit.

As an actor, you can really play the intensity and gravity and seriousness of the moment, and just rely on the circumstances being funny. The joke is kind of the situation you're in, or the way you're reacting to something, as opposed to the characters just saying something witty.

You make adjustments according to the specifics of the character.It's something I feel like a lot of my comedic heroes have always done. It's not even necessarily vulnerability, always, but it's an earnestness, a genuine desire to actually do the right thing, but then still make really misguided, stupid decisions along the way.

When I was 15 I lost a tooth and had an implant put in. Cut to 20 years later, I'm doing this part [Andy Bernard] and the script calls for my character to lose a tooth.

If there's a great story and great characters, then I can love a film in any genre, though crime thrillers and sci-fi have a particular soft spot in my heart.

My favorites movies are always character driven, it's the human equation that makes horror interesting to me, not the monsters. It's how people handle extreme circumstances.

As the character changes in the movie, it rubs off on the viewer, so the viewer also goes through that change.

It is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source: to tell us more about Queen Victoria than could be known, and thus to produce a character who is not the Queen Victoria of history.