Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Building a relationship with the character. It's just like sitting with someone you know. It's very easy to predict when they're going to shake their head or say whatever, but because I'm the author I have to make characters do what I want them to do.
Whatever you perceive, you always make a story with yourself as the main character, and that dictates your life. Then when you read 'The Four Agreements', you hear another voice beneath the story, the voice that comes from your integrity, your spirit.
I always try to keep in mind that while the characters in a farce may find themselves in outrageous dilemmas, and may behave in a way that the audience finds amusing, the characters themselves don't have the consolation of knowing they're in a comedy.
Whether consciously or unconsciously, I felt myself drawn to writing a female character who was pretty flawed and not very virtuous or wonderful or attractive in these ways that throughout literary history we've come to expect female characters to be.
Some have said that the power of a Redeemer would depend upon two things: first, upon the richness of the self that was given; and second, upon the depths of the giving. Friend and foe alike are agreed on the question of the character of Jesus Christ.
I don't intentionally try to find the scripts with unattractive characters, but I think that if a character is described in a script as heart-stoppingly beautiful, and there's nothing else said about her, it just doesn't hold a lot of interest for me.
I think carrying your gut, or your instincts, through all the learning, is one of the most important things. You learn to prepare for a part in different ways, you learn to experiment, what you do for the character - you try working in different ways.
I shy away from plot structure that depends on the characters behaving in ways that are going to eventually be explained by their childhood, or by some recent trauma or event. People are incredibly complicated. Who knows why they are the way they are?
Those who think religion has nothing to do with politics understand neither religion or politics... The things that will destroy us are: politics without principles, pleasures without conscience, knowledge without character, business without morality.
Pity can purge us of hostility and arouse feelings of identification with the characters, but it can also be a consoling reassurance which leads us to believe that we have understood, and that, in pitying, we have even done something to right a wrong.
Marriage provides an ideal setting for overcoming any tendency to be selfish or self-centered. I think one of the reasons that we are counseled to get married early in life is to avoid developing inappropriate character traits that are hard to change.
[ 1600 Penn] is an ensemble comedy about a family. It just happens to utilize the fact that my character is now being forced into this world as a jumping off point. But, in no way is it the crux of the series. It's simply an introduction to the world.
We're always attracted to characters who are people we could identify with and yet are put through incredibly tortured or difficult circumstances - the idea being that you don't really know who you are until you've been tested or suffered in some way.
Every film is a crapshoot. It's a mystery when a movie comes together. I've never been able to figure it out. I don't know how I make my choices. The only thing you can do is know there's something about a character that you really want to experience.
People do not spring forth out of the blue, fully formed – they become themselves slowly, day by day, starting from babyhood. They are the result of both environment and heredity, and your fictional characters, in order to be believable, must be also.
But so long as we can keep this crew of fantastic people together and can continue to make real breakthrough films in this category, as well as characters that stay true to what we've done in this first film, I'd be more than happy to be a part of it.
[With] this show [This Is Us], I don't think I was seeking something outside of the world I'd always played in so much as I'm ruled by characters. If it's a great character, I'm invested. It doesn't matter what the genre, what the storyline, anything.
It could be a great script but the director is not the right person for me to work for at this time. So there are a lot of elements that come into play and a lot of variables, but more than anything it's got to be a great script and a great character.
One of the things I noticed more in this draft than in any recent drafts was the importance of the character issue. Players who had baggage, like Justice, fell much farther than his talent dictated. But a lot of coaches didn't want to take the chance.
Usually I approach to acting completely blindfolded. I read the script, I connect to the character, and then I try not to think about it too much until I'm there and I'm in wardrobe and I'm with the other actors and we're going through the scene once.
I like to create a character where you believe, deep down, that they don't really care if they live or die. That's very liberating for the character because, if the character is prepared to die, then they can do anything. It's impossible to stop them.
I want to be in control of drafting at least 80% the timing and cohesiveness of character and narrative. I want to be in control of giving you an experience, and want you to be acknowledged as an audience and can do things but only in a limited scope.
What we are communicates far more eloquently than anything we say or do. There are people we trust because we know their character. Whether they're eloquent or not, whether they have human-relations techniques or not, we trust them and work with them.
In some ways, it's easier to be the lead. Week after week, scene after scene, the rhythms of filming force you to peel away a certain amount of artifice. When you're on set that much, there's a license to let the character emerge from the work itself.
I try to serve the character all the time; this one took a lot of work and was consuming. It's like climbing up a ladder and sometimes you're afraid to face yourself so you make excuses; you avoid going to the top of the ladder and look in the mirror.
You want to be able to say [to Ethan Hawke's character], "Dude, it's okay," but maybe it's not. Maybe he's not a good person. I don't know. That's the thing about people. There is no real good guy or bad guy [in A Valley Of Violence]. It's all context.
I played a lot of sarcastic, wisecracking characters for a long time, and people would think that was me. And it's very much not me, and then people would think I was being sarcastic when I wasn't: 'Oh, you're making fun of me right now.' And I wasn't!
When I step into a character's shoes, I don't judge them. I make a conscious effort not to look from the outside in but look from the inside out, and when you do that it allows you to feel and sense things more, and act and react from a core, you know?
I have shot four films for sure. On most days, I wish that there were 48 hours in a day. When a movie is coming to an end and another is going to start, I've felt that I don't want to let go of this one just yet and say goodbye to the character nicely.
A defining reality for me is what Scripture teaches in Hebrews 12, that God is our father, and that a sign that he loves us is that he disciplines us, he takes us through hardship to build character in us that could not be shaped apart from difficulty.
Keanu and I were in New York, I was prepping John Wick 2. And when Keanu [Reeves], [writer] Derek Kolstad, and myself sat down and wrote the character, it was completely, one hundred percent based on Laurence Fishburne. Like, in my head I saw this guy.
Evil is a broad church. There are so many different ways to be evil. Sometimes it's fun to be the guy who doesn't know that he's bad, like the character I played in True Blood. He was pretty angsty about it, but he thought he was doing the right thing.
My first serious attempts at writing were made in 1868, and I took up two very different lines of composition; I wrote some short stories of a very flimsy type, and also a work of a much more ambitious character, 'The Lives of the Black Letter Saints.'
Well, finally, the events I've been through have been tremendously complicated. All kinds of characters have come on the scene, and strange things have happened one after another, to the point where, if I try to think about them in order, I lose track.
In truth, no men on earth can cheer like Englishmen, who do so rally one another's blood and spirit when they cheer in earnest, that the stir is like the rush of their whole history, with all its standards waving at once, from Saxon Alfred's downwards.
Be a role model not a critic. Don't tell your children, your peers, or your subordinates what to do - show them. And when the lesson is over, keep showing them by demonstrating that your actions are part of your character, not part of their curriculum.
Though not a participant in the Business of life; I am, like the character of Addison and Steele, an impartial (or more or less impartial) Spectator, who finds not a little recreation in watching the antics of those strange and puny puppets called men.
The hardest thing about movie acting is that if you're playing a character who changes within the movie, you've got to do that, but you've got to do it out of sequence, because we never have gotten to shoot in sequence, and that's really, really tough.
I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story.
I was never an ingenue. I've always just been a character actor. When I was younger, it was a real problem, because I was never pretty enough. It was hard, not just for the lack of work, but because you have to face up to how people are looking at you.
It must not be thought that the cowardly feeling of caution and uneasy self-preservation is innate in the English character. It is the consequence of a corpulence derived from wealth and of the training of all thoughts and passions for acquisitiveness.
You say the character [of Leo Bloom] was meek and insecure, and you could've been describing me as well. I was a very shy person in those days, and working with Zero [Mostel], who was bigger than life, helped me grow. Zero was a strong influence on me.
Physiognomy is not a guide that has been given us by which to judge of the character of men: it may only serve us for conjecture. [Fr., La physionomie n'est pas une regle qui nous soit donnee pour juger des hommes; elle nous peut servir de conjecture.]
I care very much about all of my characters, recurring or not. I try to imagine something about that person beyond his or her physical appearance. After creating them, part of my job is to inhabit them and try to see their world from their perspective.
I write easily, let's put it that way. And in a novel particularly, the characters take over. And they tell me what to say and they tell me what they're doing. And I'm a third of the way into a novel and then I just let the characters finish it for me.
To improv-nerd-out for a second, it's like the most aggressive yes-anding you can do - if someone's like, "Yeah, you're super thin, right?" And you just pull that into a character and do seven more episodes of the podcast and remember to bring that up.
Scar tissue has no character. It's not like skin. It doesn't show age or illness or pallor or tan. It has no pores, no hair, no wrinkles. It's like a slip cover. It shields and disguises what's beneath. That's why we grow it; we have something to hide.
You've got to understand that in Bollywood, every actor is an instrument, and yet a human being. They come to the set with a set agenda, believing, 'This is who I am, this is what I want, and no, I am not going to become that character you want me to.'
Our human landscape is overburdened with competitions and contests. Art need not be a contest. Art is a personal quest for quality. Quality is the forerunner of acceptance. Character is the forerunner of quality. Be your own discriminating connoisseur.
Fortunately I've got a weak character, so I never did decide to dedicate myself to only one of my professions. And I'm very glad. After all, if I'd rejected chess or music then my life wouldn't have been two times, but a hundred times less interesting.