Character Quotes - Page 311

I saw the main character played by Mads Mikkelsen, and he's amazing. Hannibal had that going for it.

One of the things I find in writing about people who are dead is that, after a short or long time, no matter how close the relationship was, they become like characters in fiction.

I'm looking for diversity, all my characters may or may not be on the wrong side of the tracks. It doesn't mean that they're all the same.

My job is to bring to life the character, not to put the words on the paper.

At the core of every person or belief, there's a pain and a thorn. There's always something, whether it's a physical thing, a health thing, or an I wish I had someone or something in my life thing. We all know some level of pain, so I like to see the ugliness of characters. It's a side that we show, only when we strip down in the bathroom mirror.

I understand pain very well, so I look for that in a role. If the characters are well-written, don't tell nobody, but I'll do the damn thing for free. I'm serious. It's the writing. I love beautifully flawed characters.

A person of character knows the difference between right and wrong and always tries to do the right thing for the right reason.

Lincoln described character is a tree and reputation as its shadow. The tree will always be what it is but the shadow we see depends on where we stand and the angle of the light.

If we don't invest now in building character into children we will surely invest more tomorrow in trying to repair adults.

The best way to deal in a transparent world is just be transparent. Let your life be authentic and let people look in. Because if they want to find out, they're gonna find out. And so to me it's given me a greater sense of accountability as a CEO. It's given me a greater opportunity to lead.

Nowadays, especially in big commercial films it's much easier for the audience, and they tend to get spoonfed. It's much more interesting to me, people leave the theater and they start asking themselves questions and find their own moral compass about what these characters have been doing.

The actors I looked up to when I was a teenager, they all just disappeared into different characters.

Blackness is an ocean, a universe, a possibility that can never be exhausted. And so we have to constantly reaffirm the necessity of excavation, of archiving and curating, but also exploring, and understanding afresh and learning for the first time what it is that we need to know, and what the limits and boundaries are, and what the themes and preoccupations should be, and what the redemptive character of that erudition is. I find myself in the exciting position of doing all that, and at the same time having the obligation to explain to white people what the deal is.

With a film, you know the beginning, middle and end of your character's arc. But on a TV show, you have no idea where they're going to end up.

With the type of actor I am, which includes really diving into a role and making it as real as possible, there's nothing better than working in a real environment on location. It forces you to feel what the character's feeling, and it allows you to live in the space of the character.

Whether it's a lower or higher budget project, a TV show or a film, the words on the page are the same to me and I approach the work in the same way. My job is to lift the character from the page, whether it's a TV or film script.

That's what acting is all about - it's all about bringing truth from your own life, and putting it into your characters. If you have the advantage of using your own life in your work, that's always the way to go.

That's another great thing about Think Like a Man picture. The cast is predominantly African-American, but color is never really an issue in the film. It's rarely brought up since, at the end of the day, these guys are going through universal relationship issues that anybody can relate to. So, while the characters like "The non-committer," "The Player," and "The Dreamer" might be recognizable as common stereotypes, color isn't involved.

I've made the transition from star to character actor and I'm thoroughly enjoying it.

How do I do that preparation [for film]? Just an immersion. I have a musician's, I guess, ear for the sound of the voice but it's also important to me, in the case of [playing] someone who is controversial, to get the outlines of the character right because how they present themselves to the world has a great deal to do with how people feel about them.

According to Dickens, the first rule of human nature is self-preservation and when I forgive him for writing a character as pathetic as Oliver Twist, I'll thank him for the advice.

Cry Baby is a character so I think that the next album is going to be about a specific thing in her life or another place in her world. It's going to be a bit deeper into a bigger picture.

The Cry Baby character is so, like, based off of myself that it just really is just from personal experience. And when I was younger I was called a cry baby and made fun of for being super emotional and taking things way to personal.

Cry Baby is about Cry Baby and the next album [which I think I have a title for but I don't wanna say anything yet because I don't know and it's too early] is a place in the weird town that I'm trying to create and its Cry Baby's perspective throughout this album. You're not learning about her, you're learning about the place that she's in and her perspective. Down the line for sure I will think of other characters in this world.

I never practice before, I never work hours on a script. I just choose my characters and trust them, and after that, it's about the director taking your hand.