Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The idea of Rambo is kind of intriguing as a closing chapter. When you shoot a film as a sequel to do another sequel it's a whole other tone. But when you know it's the final chapter you try and put in there as much emotion, understanding and closure as you can. So, whereas Rocky is a lighter character and optimistic, Rambo is much darker.
For the man who makes everything that leads to happiness, or near to it, to depend upon himself, and not upon other men, on whose good or evil actions his own doings are compelled to hinge,--such a one, I say, has adopted the very best plan for living happily. This is the man of moderation; this is the man of manly character and of wisdom.
I really enjoyed doing that [Law & Order: Criminal Intent (2004) - "Graham Barnes"]. I got to work with Margaret Colin, who was a blast to work with, and a wonderful actress, and Taylor Roberts. She was fantastic. And getting to work with Vincent D'Onofrio, who's amazing. But I loved the characters of the parents, these sick psychiatrists.
People come, people go – they’ll drift in and out of your life, almost like characters in a favorite book. When you finally close the cover, the characters have told their story and you start up again with another book, complete with new characters and adventures. Then you find yourself focusing on the new ones, not the ones from the past.
In The Care and Management of Lies the wonderfully talented Winspear writes irresistibly about the First World War, both in the trenches of France and the fields of England. Her richly complex characters walk right off the page and into our imaginations, as we fight with them, farm with them, cook with them. I devoured this dazzling novel.
I don't think my work is so much about opening up wounds. I think it's about understanding the nature of the wound. I'm not bleeding on the canvas. I, like most people, have suffered traumatic events. The character of a person's life is determined by the way they deal with those events. I am a creative person and I deal with it creatively.
The first time we ever lit up a suit was on Garrett. He was the first finished costume that we had, the "Sam" character. And it brought tears to my eyes, because you're working so hard to make something happen and you're just in there, and you're delirious with sleep deprivation. To see it work, to see his reaction, made it all worthwhile.
It is a fascinating fact that father and son have given the most striking evidence for the apparently contradictory properties of the electron: the father proving its character as a particle, the son its character as a wave... Thomson was extremely proud of his son's success and tried to assimilate the new results into his old convictions.
If you'd like to meet some fully realized characters while learning some specifics of Zimbabwe's postcolonial struggles, as I did, you're likely to come away with a vague feeling of dissatisfaction. If you're willing to settle for first-rate writing and provocative meditations on memory, corruption and loss, they are all here in abundance.
If you're a musician, you create what you love and hope other people love it as well. Amongst musicians, the starting point is what they love, and then they bring people to them. As a comedian, you have to say something that people relate to, or nobody laughs. As an actor, you have to perform the character in the way that people relate to.
My book 'The Exciting Adventures of Boo' was first published when I was fifteen. It is a children's book with ten different stories. In each story, the main character Boo learns a lesson - one of the ten most important lessons I learned as a kid. I also donated all the money from my books I personally sold to my local ASPCA Animal Shelter.
I don't know that a movie like Doctor Strange couldn't have been the second or third film we made. I don't think we're doing anything in that requires past viewing, as opposed to Civil War which we wouldn't have done as the first or second movie because so much of that film is based on the pre-existing relationships between the characters.
I was a very quiet, shy child. I grew up in a small town, Louisville, Kentucky, and there weren't too many Hawaiian-Filipino girls, so I stuck out like a sore thumb. I didn't look like everyone else and didn't feel I belonged... But these things only build character and make you stronger. It taught me to grow into the woman I was to become.
Whether youre president or speaker, if youre wrong, we need to stand up and point it out. Thats what Martin Luther King had talked about: being judged by the content of our character and not the color of our skin. So some of us pounded away on some of the ridiculous policies of Pelosi - and lo and behold, over time, the public began to see.
'The Sopranos' gets praised as novelistic, but it follows the most banal of life patterns, showing the sheer tedium of being a mobster. It has dead spots, boring plotlines, weak episodes. Characters develop slowly, or don't. Like viewers, a gangster might get bored, fade out of the action, then come back to find none of his debts forgotten.
I felt pretty good growing up. I didnt feel a lot of prejudice or racism. But I do remember, if there was going to be a movie or a television show with Asian characters, I would go out of my way to avoid them, because they portrayed all Asians as either ridiculously good or ridiculously bad; you know, the whole Charlie Chan-Fu Manchu thing.
Never sound pompous. You always sound noble, noble. Absolute character of music is nobility. Even popular music can be noble, you see. If it's not noble, then it's not very good... Music is an art of emotion, of nobility, of dignity, of greatness, of love, of tenderness. All that must be brought out in music but never a show of pompousness.
I was born in Paris in the mid-1960s, and by the time I was 12 I had started going to the movies by myself. Most of the movies of that period never appealed to me. I didn't like the 'naturalism,' the sad or the 'down-to-earth' characters. What I wanted from film was fantasy, dreams, funny situations, extravagant decor - and beautiful women.
For dignity of character, consciousness is needed, not conscience and that's the function of meditation. Meditation does not give you any character directly. It does not say what to do and what not to do. It never gives you any commandments. It simply gives you a technique for becoming more aware, for being more alert, watchful, witnessing.
My fiction is based on both my own experience transformed, altered, juggled and changed to suit the demands of composition, character, and plot. If I see a theme emerging in a story I will likely take it up and develop it. I hardly ever set out with a conscious plan and if I do the story usually takes over and takes me where it wants to go.
Back in the late '90s, a writer named Daniel Handler decided that kids books were too cheerful. I mean, all the "Harry Potter" series did was occasionally kill off major characters. Thus was born "A Series Of Unfortunate Events" and its mysterious author, Lemony Snicket. "A Series Of Unfortunate Events" is now a great new series on Netflix.
Sometimes you have to make decisions that necessarily exclude the collective. It's more difficult to be a friend - even though they know each other and they treat each other like friends, it's more of a challenge for them. It's just institutional fact; the two characters that are the most aloof are the ones who have the most responsibility.
I do think that people get really emotionally involved in the TV shows that they love and I think that is fantastic. Of course they are going to have opinions. The other thing is that people project onto their television shows. They see a character and layer on many traits that are actually their own or their idea of what that character is.
It's so important to create roles and characters and projects that feature black people in a way that's not specifically targeted toward the niche market, which is, like, a black movie is created and it's produced and pitched so that only black people will watch it ... I want to see dynamic characters and roles that everyone wants to watch.
The character is everything that I felt really strongly against - she's superficial, materialistic, vain, amoral. She's all of these things, and I realised that I really hated her. How do you play someone that you hate? But I found it really interesting and it gave me a whole new insight into what my job, or my role as an actress, could be.
I just couldn't believe that it [Into the Forest script] had fallen into my lap, because I felt so incredibly connected to my character, and I understood her, and I really...I haven't had that feeling about a script since I had read Thirteen or The Wrestler when I was just like, "No one else can do this." I just feel so passionate about it.
Our institutions were not devised to bring about uniformity of opinion; if they had we might well abandon hope. It is important to remember, as has well been said, 'the essential characteristic of true liberty is that under its shelter many different types of life and character and opinion and belief can develop unmolested and unobstructed.'
I think there's a character one has if you're a chief executive officer. Movies would suggest you're a bad person - if you're wealthy, if you've done well, oh, you must be bad. And frankly, winning the lottery doesn't change who you are; you're the same person inside. And I'm the same person I was as an 18-year-old who fell in love with Ann.
All my main characters are people I'd love to sit around having coffee with. They are people who will tell you honestly about the things that scare them and worry them and trouble them. Because those moments of connection between women-when they really decide to be honest with each other about their lives-are some of the best things in life.
Worry is the most popular form of suicide. Worry impairs appetite, disturbs sleep, makes respiration irregular, spoils digestion, irritates disposition, warps character, weakens mind, stimulates disease, and saps bodily health. It is the real cause of death in thousands of instances where some other disease is named on the death certificate.
With The Brood, it was cool because it had the music, it had the different look and at the time reality-based characters were really starting to take the forefront as opposed to the cartoon character stuff that you'd seen in the past. We were already into the Attitude era. It was kind of a gimmick, but it was a cool gimmick. It wasn't corny.
I know a lot of people who say, "I reluctantly watched the first episode because I don't really like zombies and that stuff, but I was pleasantly surprised by the characters and the drama of it all." I think that's what keeps people coming back and brings new watchers to the show. What the show does is cross many, many different viewerships.
Education is not confined to books, and the finest characters often graduate from no college, but make experience their master, and life their book. [Some care] only for the mental culture, and [are] in danger of over-studying, under the delusion . . . that learning must be had at all costs, forgetting that health and real wisdom are better.
Since I knew I was going to make a film that was purely about emotions, and I knew that I ran the risk of being accused of amnesia relating to the social film, to prevent this I decided it would be good to have characters who were on the margins of society. These are characters for whom love is really the only way to know that they're alive.
First of all, it was wonderful to have a home. Consistent work when you're a journeyman actor, when you're a character actor, is really hard to come by. When you can get it, you have to cherish every moment of it - cherish the crew, cherish the cast, cherish the stage, cherish everything. Because when it's over, it's really hard to get back.
That is who Barack Obama is - a person of admirable character - and that is who he has remained for me over these last four years. I have not agreed with his every decision, but never once have I seen him break his cool, lose his composure, or abandon his insightful perspective - even during the most serious and/or absurd national disasters.
Those with less of a sense of service to the nation never understand it when men and women of character step forward to look danger and adversity straight in the eye, refusing to blink, or give ground, even to their own deaths. The protected can't begin to understand the price paid so they and their families can sleep safe and free at night.
I'm not a writer; I'm an actor. My job is to take whatever character I'm given and - especially because I have the responsibility of being a black actress, and I know young black girls are looking up, and everyone's looking to what's on television - to just try to give whatever character I'm playing as three-dimensional a portrayal as I can.
For me, it's a voyage of self-discovery. I'm able to go on a set and to explore situations, personalities, people and characters that are close to me, or maybe not. Through going there and experiencing these different people and their situations, it helps me to get oriented and develop as a human being. So, acting is fundamental to who I am.
The characters within a book were, from a certain point of view, identical on some fundamental level ‒ there weren't any images of them, no physical tangibility whatsoever. They were pictures in the reader's head, constructs of imagination and ideas, given shape by the writer's work and skill and the reader's imagination. Parents, of a sort.
I always think I know the way a novel will go. I write maps on oversized art pads like the kind I carried around in college when I was earnest about drawing. I need to have some idea of the shape of the novel, where its headed, so that I can proceed with confidence. But the truth is my characters start doing and saying things I don't expect.
I think you have to be schizoid three different ways to be an actor ... You have to be a human being. Then you have to be the character you're playing. And on top of that you've got to be the guy sitting out there in Row 10, watching yourself and judging yourself. That's why most of us are crazy to start with, or go nuts once we get into it.
The main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neuroses but rather with the approach to the numinous. But the fact that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy, and inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experience you are released from the curse of pathology. Even the very disease takes on a numinous character.
When characters are drifting away from the "correct road", or in fact from any road they were supposed to follow, they lose control, they find other goals...and possibly their real selves. All these moments of changes, of self-questioning, are like an engine to the films I make - that's where lie the dynamics I'm interested in as a director.
I have a lot of people who are soap fans and they definitely know who I am, even if they call me by my character's name. I get a lot of people thinking maybe they know me from high school. My career has been a slow burn, a gradual rise, which I prefer since this is a marathon and not a sprint, so I kind of like where I am and where I'm going.
I am not somebody who just likes to run. I am a runner. This is the difference between a pastime and a passion. I like to play golf, but I am not a golfer. I like to cook, but I am not a chef. I don't just like to run. I am a runner. It is a passion. It is part of who I am and is woven into the fabric of my personality, character, and psyche.
I first read Wendell Berry's short-story collections, "Fidelity" and then "Watch with Me." They just knocked my socks off. The characters and the fellowship of the small town reminded me of my own small town in Illinois.Then I discovered that, much like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, that all of Berry's fiction was centered in this same town.
Maybe I'm perverse, but the question of "rooting" for a character, or setting out to write a character for whom other people will root, has never had anything to do with why I read or write fiction. As long as the writing and story remain alive, intense, invigorating, provoking, the characters can be as demonic or saintly as the author wants.
I think a good writer is a mix of confidence (sure that what they're writing is going to appeal to their readers) and uncertainty (what if all these words are crap?). If you're too confident, you get an attitude that seeps through into your writing, affecting the characters and the story. If you're too uncertain, you'll never finish anything.
Eragon started as me but ended up evolving into his very own character, .. Even as he has gone through his coming- of- age story, the process of writing and publishing these novels has been my own coming- of- age story. There are parallels between my own experience and Eragon's, but fortunately, I don't have people charging at me with swords.