Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The great difficulty is first to win a reputation; the next to keep it while you live; and the next to preserve it after you die, when affection and interest are over, and nothing but sterling excellence can preserve your name. Never suffer youth to be an excuse for inadequacy, nor age and fame to be an excuse for indolence.
I feel like when you do things with such a small budget, it actually makes you be more creative... and allows you to concentrate more on the story and the characters. I think that there is something about dirty, gritty and raw filmmaking that makes it feel a little more natural and makes it easier to connect with the action.
I think the reason I choose the comic approach so often is because it's harder, therefore affording me the opportunity to show off. Also, a comic vision is my natural world view, but I've grown up in spite of myself and I can pass the comic twist if it detracts from what the characters need. Yes, the life of a saint is hard.
I like writing teen characters because they’re vulnerable to the newness of things; and vulnerability makes emotional responses raw, vital and unguarded. Lacking a context of consequences, choices are riskier and stakes higher. Life is lived without a safety net. As an author and reader, I find that a mighty charge to drama.
As an actor, you don't want to ever get too comfortable where you're like, "I know this character," and you don't do the work anymore. Then, there's something that you're going to miss. If you always stay hungry to learn more about your character, that's a healthy thing, while having a great sense of who she is, at the core.
Oh! if people were but acquainted with piety, they would not fear it so much, or give it so unattractive a character; 'tis the balm of life, and perhaps in the world it is believed to consist of bitterness, harshness, uncouthness; but, take my word for it, nothing is more gentle, more yielding, more loving than a pious soul.
Taking our stand on the immovable rock of Christ's character we risk nothing in saying that the wine of miracle answered to the wine of nature, and was not intoxicating. No counter proof can equal the force of that drawn from His attributes. It is an indecency and a calumny to impute to Christ conduct which requires apology.
I longed for a power of vision which might overpass that limit; which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen: that I desired more of practical experience than I possessed; more of intercourse with my kind, of acquaintance with variety of character, than was here within my reach.
I've just always had a personal fascination with the myth of Abraham Lincoln. And once you start to read about him and the Civil War and everything leading up to the Civil War, you start to understand that the myth is created when we think we understand a character and we reduce him to a kind of cultural national stereotype.
Jesus Christ said more about money than about any other single thing because, when it comes to a man's real nature, money is of first importance. Money is an exact index to a man's true character. All through Scripture there is an intimate correlation between the development of a man's character and how he handles his money.
I am endlessly fascinated by this notion that everyone has a secret. Some of our secrets are tiny, small things, and some of them are huge. Given that reality of the human condition, that's what our characters will go through. There will be some things where you'll just be like, "What the hell! How the hell did that happen?"
I always wanted to live the lives of different people, portray characters that are different from me. But I could have done that in front of a mirror, also, I didn't need to do films for that. At the end of the day, it's this fame, recognition, popularity, the love and appreciation you get from your audience that drives you.
You don't get roles like leading character in 'Christine' very often because people don't really like women on film to be unlikable. I think Christine is lovable, but I don't think she's likable. I think there's a fundamental difference. For me, those are the richest ones. Men have had a career of doing those kind of things.
The only way to change the world is to change the main character of our story - the one we believe that we are. If we change the main character, if we respect ourselves, then just like magic, all the secondary characters will change. We can only give what we have, and if we don't respect ourselves, how can we respect others?
Maybe I’m drunk right now, even though I don’t remember drinking anything. When I’m drunk, I say things without thinking. Drinking numbs you from your ability to reason. It makes you forget your own character and become a crazy. Maybe I am a crazy now; I’m going through so much chaos these days that reality is hard to grasp.
It is the grandeur of Christ's character which constitutes the chief power of His ministry, not His miracles or teachings apart from His character. The greatest triumph of the Gospel is Christ Himself--a human body become the organ of the Divine nature, and revealing, under the conditions of an earthly life, the glory of God.
Though I am never exactly "blocked" I do have difficult periods. I am led by a fascination with material - the challenge of presenting it in an original and engaging way. I have no problem imagining stories, characters, distinctive settings & themes - but the difficulty is choosing a voice & a language in which to present it.
Among the virtues and vices that make up the British character, we have one vice, at least, that Americans ought to view with sympathy. For they appear to be the only people who share it with us. I mean our worship of the antique. I do not refer to beauty or even historical association. I refer to age, to a quantity of years.
Someone has said,"Education is going from an unconscious to conscious awareness of one's ignorance."..No one has a corner on wisdom. All the name-dropping in the world does not heighten the significance of our character. If anything, it reduces it. Our acute need is to cultivate a willingness to learn and to remain teachable.
New online formats gutted the newspaper-ad business. Why pore over tiny print looking for a job in the want ads when you can tap a few keywords into monster.com, then click through and apply? Why pay a steep per-character rate for a classified when you can hawk a whole garage full of used stuff on EBay or Craigslist for free?
Most of the big breakthrough technologies/companies seem crazy at first: PCs, the internet, Bitcoin, Airbnb, Uber, 140 characters.. It has to be a radical product. It has to be something where, when people look at it, at first they say, ‘I don’t get it, I don’t understand it. I think it’s too weird, I think it’s too unusual.’
This is one of the ways fiction is more liberating than nonfiction - I don't have to be so concerned with fact. I had the paradigm of certain people in my head who became my characters, but I never considered these people to be from a "certain sector of society," unless we agree that we're all from certain sectors of society.
The twentieth-century conservative is concerned, first of all, for the regeneration of the spirit and character – with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding, and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded. This is conservatism at its highest.
Ultimate Warrior was a character who made an impression on people. It was his intensity, his colorfulness, but also, Warrior as an identity means something to everyone. Even through all of the grumbling and haphazard approach at the beginning to developing the character's persona, there was something that people connected to.
People often ask me if I feel discriminated against as a black female director. I don't. I'm actually offered a ton of stuff. But I only want to direct what I write. And I prefer to focus on black female characters. What's most important to me is to put characters up onscreen who are not perfect, but who are human and flawed.
Bahá'í marriage is union and cordial affection between the two parties. They must, however, exercise the utmost care and become acquainted with each other's character. This eternal bond should be made secure by a firm covenant, and the intention should be to foster harmony, fellowship and unity and to attain everlasting life.
So you know when you were work on Man of Steel, in 10 years somebody is going to do the music for Man of Steel, and a different director is going to be doing Man of Steel. That’s the reality. So all you can do is to give it not only your best, but your vision on what this character is, when you become one with that character.
Sport strips away personality, letting the white bone of character shine through. Sport gives players an opportunity to know and test themselves. The great difference between sport and art is that sport, like a sonnet, forces beauty within its own system. Art, on the other hand, cyclically destroys boundaries and breaks free.
When I read of the vain discussions of the present day about the Virgin Birth and other old dogmas which belong to the past, I feel how great the need is still of a real interest in the religion which builds up character, teaches brotherly love, and opens up to the seeker such a world of usefulness and the beauty of holiness.
There are movies where actors aren't characters but movie stars, being cool beyond belief throughout the whole movie. That is what it is. And we reveal ourselves when we act, very often without noticing. But if I can manage to do a character without showing anything of myself, then that's the ultimate goal for me. No leakage.
You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes.
I find interesting characters or lessons that resonate with people and sometimes I write about them in the sports pages, sometimes I write them in a column, sometimes in a novel, sometimes a play or sometimes in nonfiction. But at the core I always say to myself, 'Is there a story here? Is this something people want to read?'
For me, to take a movie and travel the world and go and work with these cultures and an international cast and have this spy thriller that's not just about character but also action and suspense, they're very challenging films as a producer to make, creating stories, creating set pieces that serve this character [Ethan Hunt].
In countries other than Pakistan - I won't necessarily call them 'Western' - people support me. This is because people there respect others. They don't do this because I am a Pashtun or a Punjabi, a Pakistani, or an Iranian, they do it because of one's words and character. This is why I am being respected and supported there.
It is necessary a writing critic should understand how to write. And though every writer is not bound to show himself in the capacity of critic, every writing critic is bound to show himself capable of being a writer; for if he be apparently impotent in this latter kind, he is to be denied all title or character in the other.
I never regard my characters, my protagonists, as personifications. It's not that I sit by my desk and I pick up a character who will be the spokesperson of the Israeli Left, another one will be the spokesperson of the Right, another one will be the spokesperson of Middle Eastern Jews, European Jews, religions Jews and so on.
A society whose principles are acquisition, profit, and property produces a social character oriented around having, and once the dominant pattern is established, nobody wants to be an outsider, or indeed an outcast; in order to avoid this risk everybody adapts to the majority, who have in common only their mutual antagonism.
Escapism, we are led to believe, is evidence of a deficiency in character, a certain failure of temperament, and like so many -isms, it is to be strenuously avoided. 'How do you expect to get ahead?,' people ask. But the question altogether misses the point. The escapist doesn't want to get ahead. He simply wants to get away.
I'm a musician, and I'm fascinated with the effects of sound, and tone, and pitch and melody and all that sort of stuff. It's the first thing I have to solidify whenever...I get into a character. The first thing I need to get sorted out before I can then move forward, before I can feel any confidence whatsoever, is the voice.
the less you respect, the less respectable you are; the less you honor, the less in you is to be honored. There are those 'whom not to know argues one's self unknown,' so if you have no reverence in a world where there is so much that is noble and venerable, then there will be something terrible lacking in your own character.
So if there was a way that I knew something about my character's desires or the things that they were resisting because I was saving it for some grand epiphany moment for my readers, I just feel like that's when you can feel the machine at work in a story. That's when you can feel the writer pulling the strings of the puppet.
Nothing discloses real character like the use of power. It is easy for the weak to be gentle. Most people can bear adversity. But if you wish to know what a man really is, give him power. This is the supreme test. It is the glory of Lincoln that, having almost absolute power, he never abused it, except upon the side of mercy.
Get inside her head. Get inside any character's head and ask what they want in this scene. And if you work from the perspective of what they want, there's not going to be any wrong answer. There's going to be some boring answers, but none of them are going to be wrong. As long as she has agency, then you're on the right track.
The interesting thing about Hain is that he's not a very interesting character. He's not fabulously clever. He's not a great policeman. He's not hugely charismatic. I'd describe him as a kind-of Chekhovian character. He's an ordinary bloke, to whom extraordinary things have happened. Which is quite hard to play, I have to say.
For just one second, look at your life and see how perfect it is. Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop waiting. This is it: there's nothing else. It's here, and you'd better decide to enjoy it or you're going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever.
My daughter was a toddler. I had no idea there was anything wrong with kids' media.I started watching little preschool shows with her or G-rated videos or whatever; I couldn't believe what I was seeing, that there seemed to be far more male characters than female characters in what we make for little kids. It was just a shock.
Animators do amazing working translating and interpolating the characters [in the Planet of the apes], the facial performances. What we're creating on set - if you don't get it on the day, in the moment, on set, in front of the camera, with the director and the actors. The emotional content of the scene and the acting choices.
Everybody thinks that 2-D is Damon, but none of the characters are based on any of us. 2-D is the classic stupid pretty boy singer. He's the fall guy, the stooge. Everyone takes the piss out of him. He had a car accident where he went through the windscreen and ended up with two bumps on his head. It knocked some cool into him
The great thing about the animation process is that is goes from, I write the lines, it goes to the actors, the actors bring a whole world to that, they bring the characters to life, then it goes to the animators, then it goes to the editor who cuts it together, and then you screen it and it goes back through the system again.
I hate the term "mystery". That's not what I write. I think the Scarpetta novels are much more character-driven than an average puzzle solver. Writing should be like a pane of glass - there's another world on the other side and your vision carries you there, but you're not aware of having passed through a barrier to get there.