Character Quotes - Page 544

I enjoy pushing my characters to the limit. No matter how far out there I go, I look for things that make the characters human.

I didn't know how to explain what I meant; sociopathy wasn't just being emotionally deaf, it was being emotionally mute, too. I felt like the characters on our muted TV, waving their hands and screaming and never saying a word out loud.

I was very excited to hone in on John Goodman. Casting John first really set the tone. He's very good at being terrifying and being hilarious, and I loved the idea of that character not being merely 'moustache-twirly'. I enjoyed being scared by him.

I've always been a fan of [Mary Elizabeth Winstead's]. She gets to do some fun action-y stuff she brings this gritty swashbuckle to. I think there's a lot of movies that have women in peril running away from the scarier things and then end up being saved by a man, so it's great to see this character MacGyver her way out of situations, whether physically MacGyvering away, or mentally MacGyvering a way out of something. I relate to her more than I relate to most leading men in movies.

There are characters that become more popular as we fall in love with them.

It's immoral to parent irresponsibly... And it doesn't help matters any when prime time tv, like "Murphy Brown", a character who is supposed to represent a successful career woman of today, mocks the importance of the father by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another "lifestyle choice." Marriage is probably the best anti-poverty program there is... Even though our cultural leaders in Hollywood, network TV, the national newspapers routinely jeer at [such values] I think most of us in this room know that some things are good, and other things are wrong.

I think books are just a great ticket to get you outside of yourself. You can not be you for a second and live in the shoes of a character, which is a special thing.

Shooting at night in Los Angeles is amazing. The city shuts down at 10 P.M. every night, and a whole different cast of characters comes out.

In 20 years I want to look back and see a collection of crazy characters that I made - a menagerie.

I start with an image, then I go from the image toward exploring the situation. Then I write a scene, and from the scene I find the character, from the character I find the larger plot. It's like deductive reasoning - I start with the smaller stuff and work backward.

I think that the way that I write stories is by instinct. You have some basic ideas - a character, or an image, or a situation that sounds compelling - and then you just feel your way around until you find the edges of your story. It's like going into a dark room... you stumble around until you find the walls and then inch your way to the light switch.

I don't think anybody deals well with tragedy or grief, but maybe my characters are particularly bad at it. Which is why I love them.

I have long admired Caroline Leavitt's probing insight into people, her wit and compassion, her ability to find humor in dark situations, and conversely, her tenderness towards characters.

It's the weirdest thing. When you go into acting, you expect to be a huge star and to be recognized. It did happen, but not in the way you expect it to. In L.A., I'm just another character actor.

The Simpsons can go anywhere in the world and not worry about any budgetary issues. However, even when the show has had its run, I think the characters can go on in perpetuity.

It wasn't like this happy-go-lucky experience, shooting Norman movie. It was something I kind of had to, sort of dedicate a certain level of focus and energy to kind of just stay in this headspace that would allow me to access - because it's also a very emotional movie at times. This was the first time I ever played a real character, a fully fleshed out, dimensionalized, multi-faceted character, as opposed to a part. There's not very much opportunity for somebody of my age and my look, so for a character-driven piece like this to come along is a rare thing.

Writing is a solitary existence. Making a movie is controlled chaos - thousands of moving parts and people. Every decision is a compromise. If you're writing and you don't like how your character looks or talks, you just fix it. But in a movie, if there's something you don't like, that's tough.

Critics have found in the narrative a veneer of erudition that cloaks nothing more than a James Bond-style romp, albeit a highly addictive one. His publisher has described it as 'a thriller for people who don't like thrillers'. One newspaper put it thus: 'It is terribly written, its characters are cardboard cutouts, the dialogue is excruciating in places and, a bit like a computer manual, everything is overstated and repeated - but it is impossible to put the bloody thing down.

Atheists are suffering from bad PR. What if Sesame Street had an atheist character?

Some of the things I love the most are when a writer or a visionary takes on sort of an iconic character and then spins it. Like with Frank Miller, Batman was this one thing for basically forty years, and then Frank Miller came along and said he can also be this other thing. And Christopher Nolan came along and said he can also be this other thing. The idea of taking iconic comic book characters or superhero characters or mythic characters and subverting the genre or coming up with a new idea is something that's really interesting to me.

Hopping around time in a non-linear storytelling fashion (on 'Lost') allows you to bring back characters who are dead and, in some cases, buried. Now that time travel is the story itself, it opens up even more doors. So when an actor reads that they're getting killed off on the show, they're basically, like, 'Okay, but should I still bother to show up next week?'

The fun thing about doing origin stories is you are introducing the audience to characters.

If you had a man when I was your friend and then we started hooking up and you broke up with your boyfriend, so now we're together and you have a new male friend? I'm going to look at you sideways because your character's horrible and now I'm thinking you're going to do to me what you did to your ex.

We have the agency to choose which characteristics will define us; those choices are not thrust upon us.

If your life becomes only a medium of production, then many of the good human values and characteristics will be lost.