Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The old fashioned family physician and general practitioner ... was a splendid figure and useful person in his day; but he was badly trained, he was often ignorant, he made many mistakes, for one cannot by force of character and geniality of person make a diagnosis of appendicitis, or recognize streptococcus infection.
The satisfaction of short fiction does not come close to the rich pleasure I get as a writer in the long deep immersion in the same long work and its growing complexity. I suppose you might say I love to wallow in my characters and imaginary worlds. I love to play with the whole necklace, not just one glittering stone.
I did a lot of work with early 20th century attitudes, the kind of superficial notions and behavior that prompt people who don't know history very well to think that "people were different back then" - but beneath all that are characters who react in ways that we can all recognize, and will always be able to recognize.
I loved the idea of doing impressions and mimicking and playing around with the spectrum of your own voice. That's what I enjoy most about doing voiceovers. You can be completely unconscious with the rest of your body and just concentrate on doing something with your voice, creating an entire character with your voice.
But I think it is hardly an argument against a man's general strength of character, that he should be apt to be mastered by love. A fine constitution doesn't insure one against small-pox or any other of those inevitable diseases. A man may be very firm in other matters, and yet be under a sort of witchery from a woman.
'There may be some, perhaps - I don't know that there are - who abuse his kindness,' said Mr. Wickfield. 'Never be one of those, Trotwood, in anything. He is the least suspicious of mankind; and whether that's a merit, or whether it's a blemish, it deserves consideration in all dealings with the Doctor, great or small.
I don't see black people as victims even though we are exploited. Victims are flat, one- dimensional characters, someone rolled over by a steamroller so you have a cardboard person. We are far more resilient and more rounded than that. I will go on showing there's more to us than our being victimized. Victims are dead.
I should just stop trying to control what's coming out of my mouth. I'm always going to keep what's important to me in mind and I completely understand considering that we're playing characters that are so coveted by so many people so I get why they want to know more about us. I just sort of have to not think about it.
I love playing real people. It's a huge challenge and responsibility which I take on board and which I relish. It also scares me to death. Give me a totally fictional character and I don't have the same sort of responsibility. If, though, I play Sigmund Freud or Robert Maxwell or whoever then there is a responsibility.
That's where the inspiration was and so the more that you rewrite and the more you rewrite and the more the numbnuts are coming in to give you notes then the more problems you run into and the more it suddenly doesn't seem like the movie, the story, the characters changed, watered down and we don't have that with this.
Here`s the Republican Party with round heels for anybody who says the right thing at the current moment. Regardless of their record, regardless of their character, and regardless of who they are, it seems that if you say the right stuff now to the Republican ear, Steve Schmidt, they will say yes, no matter who you are.
I was so fortunate. My parents lived lives of service. They helped other people, that was their second nature; it came to them so naturally. It wasn't forced. This is their character, and it's a big advantage I have, being raised by people like this, having a secure and stable life, and a lot of love and encouragement.
Pop managers are fixed in the dramatic stock character repertoire too, ever since the first British pop film musical, Wolf Mankowitz's 'Expresso Bongo' of 1959, with Cliff Richard as Bongo Herbert and Laurence Harvey as his manager. The key components were cast as X parts gay, X parts Jewish and triple X opportunistic.
Independence of mind or strength of character is rarely found among those who cannot be confident that they will make their way by their own effort.... Indeed, when security is understood in too absolute a sense, the general striving for it, far from increasing the chances of freedom, becomes the greatest threat to it.
I have a big, long episode [in Full Circle] with Calista [Flockhart], and then my character actually carries out through a lot of it because he was a cop investigating this crime. But it is almost hard to remember, even though it wasn't that long ago. We shot it so fast. We literally shot that whole episode in one day.
There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.
To be honest, I didn't want to believe that Christianity could radically transform someone's character and values. It was much easier to raise doubts and manufacture outrageous objections that to consider the possibility that God actually could trigger a revolutionary turn-around in such a depraved and degenerate life.
I think it was just part of the storyline [in CSI: Miami] and the producer called me beforehand and said, 'Listen, I am going to kind of do something with your character that looks like she might get fired, but I just want to reassure you that we're going to have you back,' and I thought, 'Oh god, I hope that is true.'
As a director, what matters is how you penetrate the soul of the person in front of the camera and let the actor blur the boundaries between the character and the person themselves. In order to achieve that, I try to make people feel at ease, to be mindless of problems and be skinless and give everything to the camera.
It's true in the beginning I started playing villains, and I think that's pretty clear, because if you don't conventionally look a certain way and you've got a certain kind of presence when you're young, then what's available to you is character roles, and the best character roles when you're young tend to be villains.
I kind of found a niche for myself after 'Firefly'. I found something that I enjoyed doing and that I did well, but as far as how I seek out a part, it's always different. It's always something that lights you on fire when you read it. It might be just one scene, it might be one line that defines the character for you.
I don't think there is a need of the categorization 'woman writing'. I think in some sense writers lost their gender when they walk into the world of words; I believe that writers ought to be able to slip under the skins of both men and women. Only then will the writing and the characters have credibility and strength.
He [Wilhelm Reich] believed that the individual's walk, stance, and breath patterns revealed a specific character type. Reich thought chronic muscular tension indicated repression and blocked the expression of affect. An example is the tight holding of the chest area as a sign of repressed feelings of need and longing.
Friends and family do not believe you write fiction. They truly believe that every word you write is either autobiographical or based on them. I once had a character say that she never wanted to be invited to another children's birthday party, and I never received another children's birthday party invitation ever again.
The minute I know it's real to the minute we start shooting, I will work on the script, breaking it down and working on the character, doing as much research as I possibly can to the point where I feel like I eat, sleep and breathe it without looking at a page. Then I go in and try to forget all of it and just be there.
With Othello, Shakespeare posed this problem of a black man in a white society in the role that he's playing. And Shakespeare gave Othello such dignity - he came not from - as he said - not from hate but from honor, from a sense of his own human dignity. And to me, to my mind, there could be no greater character played.
I was playing this sort of asshole actor [in The Jenny McCarthy Show]. And we shot the pilot, and it was a guaranteed go. It was going to be 24 [episodes] on the air. No questions from NBC. And we shot the pilot, and I was in Toronto doing a movie, and I got a call saying they cut the character, that I was off the show.
I've never had a working relationship like I have with them. I developed a lot of the design of this show with them. That conversation was about, "What are your needs? What are you looking for? Will this work for you guys? Will a show work where you've got one episode per character?" They really were a creative partner.
I always start drawing any job by planning out to some degree the locales and trying to nail the characters. If they're existing characters, I'll draw them several times on rough paper just to get a feeling for them. The ideal when you're drawing a comic is to have everything in your head, not to have to refer to notes.
Writing is akin to method acting. Before the writer can render a fully convincing world, he or she must inhabit that world, and every major character who lives there. I'm not suggesting that one always has to go this far. But I truly believe what makes the setting for my novels come alive is that I've lived there first.
It's really an organic sort of process. You start off with the character on the page. You fall in love with that character and you have to represent that character well and I think it's just an evolution there. Using the accent and speaking the lines with the accent in fact opens the door to who the character really is.
Simon's walls were covered in what looked like pages ripped from a comic book, but when I squinted, I realized they were hand drawn. Some were black-and-white, but most were in full color, everything from character sketches to splash panels to full pages, done in a style that wasn't quite manga, wasn't quite comic book.
I really don't know what happened in reference to 'The Butler.' Mr. Daniels and I had a conversation. I had the script, the email that goes along with it in reference to the character, read the script, loved it. Then I never heard from Mr. Daniels again, and the next I saw was that Oprah Winfrey is now playing the part.
My work sanitizes it (emotion) but it is also symbolic of commercial art sanitizing human feelings. I think it can be read that way.... People mistake the character of line for the character of art. But it's really the position of line that's important, or the position of anything, any contrast, not the character of it.
Perhaps no custom reveals our character as a Nation so clearly as our celebration of Thanksgiving Day. Rooted deeply in our Judeo-Christian heritage, the practice of offering thanksgiving underscores our unshakable belief in God as the foundation of our Nation and our firm reliance upon Him from Whom all blessings flow.
It's nuts that we've reached a situation where representing female characters - let alone minorities - is considered "social responsibility" and not, you know, depicting half the world's population. I often feel like the gaming audience is so much more diverse than the characters represented in the games that they play.
Oh, I'm developing a beautiful character! It droops a bit under cold and frost, but it does grow fast when the sun shines. That's the way with everybody. I don't agree with the theory that adversity and sorrow and disappointment develop moral strength. The happy people are the ones who are bubbling over with kindliness.
For me, water means a lot of things. It's my belief that human beings are just like plants. They can't live without water or they'll dry up. Human beings, without love or other nourishment, also dry up. The more water you see in my movies, the more the characters need to fill a gap in their lives, to get hydrated again.
I do think it's important to be smiling and not make it all about business. You'll look back and regret it later, if you don't take advantage of your youth and your ability to travel. And it gives you something to pull from and inspiration to play your characters, and for your life and your development as a human being.
I never got really into Twitter until more recently when I started doing the Dirt Nasty thing, and created that other character. I think it's almost essential now. I don't think Leonardo DiCaprio necessarily needs to do it, but someone like me, who's somewhere in the middle of nowhere and a shitstack, I need to do that.
I think anybody who is writing finds he puts a little bit of himself in all of the characters, at least in this kind of a strip. It's the only way that you can survive when you have to do something every day. You have to put yourself, all of your thoughts, all of your observations and everything you know into the strip.
The truth is, an actor's performance is the result of work by a lot more people than just the actor. When you see that character portrayed up on screen, there is the work certainly of the actor, but there's the work of the editor, there's the work of what the camera was doing. What the music was doing, all of the above.
Peter Parker is probably the most relatable superhero - maybe ever - because he goes through something that basically everyone has to go through. Whether it's puberty or talking to girls or doing homework, he does it in such a human way. That's why he's such a beloved character: because so many people can relate to him.
I love playing different characters. I just do. I want to play even more quirky and interesting characters and just something that people wouldn't automatically think that I would be. I want to go against the grain a bit and I'm hoping people will be open-minded enough to cast me in stuff that's going against the grain.
Compassion may be called the fundamental of all good art because it alone can tell you what other beings feel and experience. Only compassion severs the bonds of your personal limitations, and gives you deep access into the inner life of the character you study, without which you cannot properly prepare it for the stage
The creation of George Smiley, the retired spy recalled to hunt for just such a high-ranking mole in 'Tinker, Tailor,' was extremely personal. I borrowed elements of people I admired and invested them in this mythical character. I'm such a fluent, specious person now, but I was an extremely awkward fellow in those days.
My novels are never truly finished, even if they're published and sitting on the shelf. While I may no longer be interested in spending time with that particular set of characters, I can't help but think about all the ways the book could be different, the small, insignificant tweaks that no one but me would ever notice.
The hardest thing to get right is to figure out how to bring all those characters together, and to fulfill the promise of The Avengers. They really set a very high bar for themselves because you've been setting this coalition up, for these five movies, and they better deliver. And in my opinion, they thoroughly deliver.
When it was first proposed to establish laboratories at Cambridge, Todhunter, the mathematician, objected that it was unnecessary for students to see experiments performed, since the results could be vouched for by their teachers, all of them of the highest character, and many of them clergymen of the Church of England.
I don't like words coming out of a character's mouth that I adore because not only is he a little bit duplicitous but he's kind of practical in the way he thinks, and he thinks in terms of everyone's humanity and how quickly we can go against what we think we meant when we said it or what we believe or blah, blah, blah.