Character Quotes - Page 588

The wonderful thing about Crystal in Mr. Sunshine is that she doesn't have any boundaries. She's not aware socially of what's correct and incorrect. Crystal's probably the craziest character I've ever had to do and the furthest I've gone, with the only exception being Away We Go - I was pretty big in that.

It was great to have a Republican character as likeable as Alan Alda was in the West Wing. He was one Republican I would probably vote for; he was old school.

There was a courtroom scene where my son is convicted of killing Kevin Spacey's character. I find the bloody T-shirt and realize my husband did it. I get up the courage to take the shirt and send it to the police as evidence. I go out of the house for the first time. There was all this stuff I had to do that became quite truncated, because they slimmed down the movie. I understand the American Beauty is brilliant without all that stuff, but for me, personally, it was hard to see all that go.

Acting. Whenever I am playing a character, I use my real life experiences, which puts me on the line of reliving some of those good and bad times. Acting requires risk, and that's what feeling vulnerable is.

Dance is a way of connecting and finding a moment with someone. It really is something special and unique that you don't find in any other physical activity, you know? Because it's you with another person, and you guys dive in together with these characters. So dance, to me, has been really special to create amazing bonds with people.

We can treat human responses to cognitions as involving law-like connections grounded on free choices which show themselves in our character.

Of course, the character of my garden is also determined by things beyond any human decision, mine or anyone else's.

When I need to stretch my legs, I can walk across the street to the museum and relax among the illustrations of Abraham Lincoln's life, too. In a way, it reflects the halves of Lincoln's own character - one all jokes and buffoonery, the other all high-minded seriousness. If he could absorb both into his personality, I think I can, too.

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.

I think Will Smith's character says it best in his opening speech when he says, "We long for love, we wish we had more time and we're afraid of death."

The movement for women's liberation was about an emotional transformation, an explosion, a feeling all over the country that things must be different, and ideas about how they should be. I think fiction can capture that kind of thing better than other genres because in fiction you can explore the feelings of your characters - the before and the after.

I am not a psychological novelist, and I try very hard not to allow the reader to see the plight or circumstances of the characters as individual psychological plights. That's my preference; still, a lot of people do read my novels as psychological studies, and they're right to read them that way too, if that's what they mean to them.

I really want readers to put themselves into the shoes of each character. So the opening lines are an orienting technique: this is where you are, this is who you are. Go.

I find that a lot of my best character stuff and ideas come unwittingly from novels. In scripts, it's a lot about the outward signs of whatever's happening - you have the end result. Whereas in a novel you get a buildup of the whys and wherefores, and you're let into the backstory.

I like to take a character and develop it

We pass our values, ideas and moral character on to our children, but we do that knowing that our children are going to revise our knowledge and reshape their values. There's something very paradoxical and profound about being a parent as opposed to parenting. We put in all this effort and energy not so that we can shape a child of a particular sort, but so that all sorts of possibilities can happen in the future.

There was a saying that a man's true character was revealed in defeat. I thought it was also revealed in victory.

I always wanted to be a character actor. I love watching movies where you dont recognize someone because theyre so lost in the part.

I think most of the time with independent films, you don't know where it's gonna end up. I've done a number of films that may never see the light of day, so it ends up being exclusively about the content, material, the characters and the story. Things that you maybe wouldn't get an opportunity to do otherwise. So, as an actor, obviously it's so different.

I've always loved film and wanted to work in film. I just love working and creating new characters, and trying different genres and different things.

I like to play any character that allows me the freedom to explore it and teach the audience something they didn't know, and show them a journey they identify with... or be inspired, or moved. Anything that touches someone's heart is important for me.

What I learned from doing The Graduate was it doesnt matter what the medium is... as long as the material is inspiring and the characters are well written.

I was always amazed the way people would come in looking one way and transform completely to the point where I couldn't recognize their language, their accent, the way they looked, their hair, their face even changed becoming so inside of the character.

It's hard, because when you talk about process or your characters ruling your narrative, it sounds like you have no control, but obviously you're ultimately the author, so you do have control.

"Someone": I understood that this was a character who in her own life her voice hadn't much been heard and in literature her life isn't much heard. For me, it was resisting all the more appealing characters and listening to the voice that hadn't been much heard from.