Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Plot comes first. The plot is the archictecture of your novel. You wouldn't build a house without a plan. If I wrote without a plot, it would just be a pile of bricks. Characters are your servants. They must serve your plot.
When it comes to your career, you must always try and allow the positive aspects of your character to dictate what happens to you. Be led by your talent, not by your self-loathing; those other things you just have to manage.
In our brief national history we have shot four of our presidents, worried five of them to death, impeached one and hounded another out of office. And when all else fails, we hold an election and assassinate their character.
With proper acting, I don't know what I would play - I got sent a script for a play, and it said in the notes that my proposed character was 'hideously fat and ugly'. That made my day. I mean, I do know I am no oil painting.
The murderer only takes the life of the parent and leaves his character as a goodly heritage to his children, whilst the slanderer takes away his goodly reputation and leaves him a living monument to his children's disgrace.
I think the existence of zombies would contradict certain laws of nature in our world. It seems to be a law of nature, in our world, that when you get a brain of a certain character you get consciousness going along with it.
There's a lot of actors I think that appear so much more together as the characters they portray as opposed to the actual people, so I know I've said this before: Hollywood's not a place where you're rewarded for growing up.
You learn to rely on a few basic movements and use your voice to the greatest extent possible to convey your emotions. So there was a technical challenge there and a responsibility to create a character from behind the mask.
I never know what's going to happen or what opportunities are going to be given to me. I've found with the opportunities that I've been given have made it possible for me to explore different characters and exciting stories.
The higher education so much needed today is not given in the school, is not to be bought in the market place, but it has to be wrought out in each one of us for himself; it is the silent influence of character on character.
When they first asked me to do 'Hulk,' my first instinct was to say no because I didn't think I had anything to say with the character, especially when they said, 'Please do what you did with 'Daredevil,' whatever that was.'
When you're playing a real character, you want to honor that person and receive inspiration from that person. They need to anoint you in some way that allows you to borrow just a small piece of their soul. That is the flame.
My characters are more like men than these real men are, see. They're rough and rude, they got hands and they got bellies. They hate and they lust; break the skin of civilization and you find the ape, roaring and red-handed.
Doing jobs that are completely different to the last thing I did pushes me as an actor to change as much as I can. It would be easy for me to stay in a similar vein of characters or jobs, but I'm drawn to challenging myself.
That applies, by the way, even to some of the folks who are now [Donald] Trump supporters. They're responding to a fictional character named Barack Obama who they see on Fox News or who they hear about through Rush Limbaugh.
The harder part of doing a real story is that there are real people and you have a responsibility to not just go crazy with their lives and have them do things which are not their character, that they then have to live with.
Filmmaking is finding a piece of granite and you start to chip away and then you have the shape of a head, the shape of the arm, you can see the shape of the face and the face starts to gather character. You have to find it.
The Ludolphian number is fixed in eternity— not a digit out of place, all characters in their proper order, an endless sentence written to the end of the world by the division of the circle’s diameter into its circumference.
A revolutionary party is, in its essence, the party of its leader that carries out his ideology and cause, and the main thing in its building is to ensure the unitary character and inheritance of his ideology and leadership.
Lots of people committed crimes during the year who would not have done so if they had been fishing. The increase of crime is among those deprived of the regenerations that impregnate the mind and character of the fisherman.
I am not one of those actors who dwells on the histrionics and the subtext and future text of the character. I deal with the scenes that I'm doing at that specific time, because if I do that, they play in more of a real way.
The stories I love the most are where the author has a lot of empathy for everyone. The author loves their characters and takes their situations really seriously, and you feel like you're just dropped into a different world.
Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heartone of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man.
I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really.
The little troubles and worries of life may be as stumbling blocks in our way, or we may make them stepping-stones to a nobler character and to Heaven. Troubles are often the tools by which God fashions us for better things.
I try to think what the character is thinking. Then, hopefully, I begin to feel it. I act and react not because Im recalling a dog killed by a fire engine, but because Im concentrating on what the character is going through.
It doesn't matter to me whether I go back to outer space or not [while acting]. The job's the same and I don't have any sort of genre preferences. I'm looking for a good story and a good character, whether earthbound or not.
I have a clear view of 12 years of history of my inner self. First the cramped self, that self with big blinkers, then the disappearance of the blinkers and the self, now gradually the reemergence of a self without blinkers.
The American character looks always as if it had just had a rather bad haircut, which gives it, in our eyes at any rate, a greater humanity than the European, which even among its beggars has all too much a professional air.
Duke Chartres used to boast that no man could have less real value for character than himself, yet he would gladly give twenty thousand pounds for a good one, because he could immediately make double that sum by means of it.
The serial number of a human specimen is the face, that accidental and unrepeatable combination of features. It reflects neither character nor soul, nor what we call the self. The face is only the serial number of a specimen
I think it is kind of important to direct someone so the character is appealing, but, as an actress, I find it frustrating because I think, "Why do I have to be more likable than a man would have to be saying the same line?"
It is the task of several months and it is a fact that a girl, either while rehearsing or actually playing, may be training for some character or feature in some future production not yet definitely fixed even in my own mind.
We are not known by our bank balances or who our parents are. It is ultimately we who have to prove ourselves. It is not important to own a particular brand of car. But we should be a brand in ourselves. Each of us is unique.
The best compliment I ever got from the public or producers or directors is that I just totally blend in and become the character and they don't notice me and that the play happens or the movie happens or the TV show happens.
Singing is an incredible expression and something that is important to me, but where I feel comfortable with how much I reveal about myself is acting. I enjoy the characters, the costumes, the wigs and just being a chameleon.
In a lot of films, they're showing more complete, developed characters of diverse ethnic backgrounds. The larger concern is to be able to tastefully explore the stereotypes, and still move past them to see the core of people.
So many times, you get a script and it says, "And then, the character cries," and you read the lines and think, "That would never make me cry. Those lines are so untruthful." My approach is just to be honest to the situation.
You don't want to burn any bridges, but you also want to make sure you leave your character bridges wide open and you're never seen as one particular thing, or that's who you'll be, unfortunately, for the rest of your career.
You know, I always got offered other stuff. Not the romantic leads, obviously. But very often it's a role that's underwritten, where the character has no personality at all. And they need a character actor who can fill it in.
No author can create a character out of nothing. He must have a model to give him a starting point; but then his imagination goes to work, he builds him up, adding a trait here, a trait there, which his model did not possess.
When I go to the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World, they have wonderful topiary in the shapes of characters. I apply the principle to my life. "Prune away that which is not a Disney princess!" I think Michelangelo said that.
I'm way past the idea of using ideology or political view as a gauge of human character. I simply don't believe it. And many people, I tend to think most people, feel that way. Since I don't have to worry about it, I'm happy.
The choices that make a significant difference in our lives are the tough ones. They're not often fun or easy, but they're the ones we have to make, and each is a deliberate step toward better understanding who we really are.
The man who in view of gain thinks of righteousness; who in the view of danger is prepared to give up his life; and who does not forget an old agreement however far back it extends - such a man may be reckoned a complete man.
I fancy it must be the quantity of animal food eaten by the English which renders their character insusceptible to civilization. I suspect it is in their kitchens and not in their churches that the reformation must be worked.
To me, 'Educating Rita' is the most perfect performance I could give of a character who was as far away from me as you could possibly get and of all the films I have ever been in, I think it may be the one I am most proud of.
You have to really think about what kind of guy the character is and decide on a style that works, that complements my physicality and that's going to be believable, but also be compelling for the audience and for the camera.
The other main difference between film and television is that you have the opportunity to flush out a character, over a longer period of time. Whereas with a film, you're confined to two or three hours, or whatever it may be.
The eternal challenge for screenwriter adapters is figuring out how to make something work on screen, when so much of what made it work in the book were the thoughts of the character, and obviously wanting to avoid voiceover.