Character Quotes - Page 581

I feel like you can't get an audience to like your character if she's actually cool, but you can if she's trying to be cool and sometimes fails.

She was like a heroine in a novel that she herself was writing the character kept protesting that she was too strong for love and yet the narrator went on describing her desire.

Years ago, I was thinking about this type of character and what happens when you've lived in this sort of strange, surreal world where it's parties all the time and then you don't get to live there anymore. What do you do with the rest of your life?

Playing those one-dimensional characters is actually really difficult because you're not dealing with somebody you would ever really know. I don't think anybody here could imagine actually knowing Cindy Campbell from 'Scary Movies.' So, in a way, your job is so much easier when you're playing a person that you really understand and that seems very relatable. I think I was coming to a place in my career where I was like, "I'd like to do something a little more rewarding."

An actor's responsibility is to play a character truthfully. That's their responsibility. That's where it ends. If they choose to use their reach and accessibility in order to further something that matters to them, that's their choice and that's great - but it's not for anybody to choose it for them.

Conflict, which rouses up the best and highest powers in some characters, in others not only jars the whole being, but paralyzes the faculties.

To some characters, fame is like an intoxicating cup placed to the lips,--they do well to turn away from it who fear it will turn their heads. But to others fame is "love disguised," the love that answers to love in its widest, most exalted sense.

In our relations with the people around us, we forgive them more readily for what they do, which they can help, than for what they are, which they cannot help.

As what we call genius arises out of the disproportionate power and size of a certain faculty, so the great difficulty lies in harmonizing with it the rest of the character.

I base everything on my own life experiences as a female. I start from there, and then I look for characters and settings that I think are cinematic, where I can use symbols and imagery to tell a story.

I love a large cast of characters. That's the way life is: it's flooded with people and we keep them all straight.

The idea I pursue is the one that keeps coming back to me. The characters I think about as I'm falling asleep at night or when I'm driving to the grocery store are the one's I wind up writing about.

I craft everything in the beginning. I know where the characters are going before I start writing the book.

One of the characteristics of the young is "I want it now."

The Neapolitan novels have a lot of references to things outside, to things of the world, to culture, politics, the city of Naples. People have mentioned that Naples is like a character in the novels.

The Leftovers was an absolutely extraordinary experience. After the first season of learning to work with Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta, and all of the writers, you didn't question it because it all made sense. Because Damon knows those characters so well and has thought it through so well, there was never a time that I asked a question where it wasn't answered fully.

It took a very long time to really enjoy an audition, and to get in the room and do the best that I can. I've just been deeply grateful for my career, and that the love for the work and the characters is alive still. I try to let go of the armor as much as possible and not be afraid.

Obviously, I'm a fan of satire. I'd debate anyone, but it would have to be the actual person. That would be my only hesitation about debating Stephen Colbert. If he were playing a character, it wouldn't really work.

Gestating characters feels something like the mental equivalent of gestating a baby. In both cases, to create them you lose yourself. Or at least you reshape yourself to encompass them.

Developing characters is a strange thing. In the beginning they are abstract and I wonder how to move on from there.

Age is not so much a feature of your character, as the spot where you stand for a pretty fleeting time on the arc of your life.

I was supposed to write a romantic comedy, but my characters broke up.

Besides being asked why I write about young characters, I am often asked how I write about young characters. How do I throw myself across the chasm of full adulthood to relive that period? I guess I don’t, really. Age is not so much a feature of your character, as the spot where you stand for a pretty fleeting time on the arc of your life.

Love and marriage are wonderful arenas in which to place a character. We are most likely to risk our morals and beliefs while in love. Betrayal gives tremendous insights into a character as well.

Sometimes it seems to me that all of life is a struggle to contain the natural impulses of the body and spirit, and that what we call character represents only the degree to which we are successful in this endeavor.