Characters Quotes: Timeless Wisdom from Memorable Personalities

"The truest characters of ignorance are vanity and pride and arrogance"

Samuel Butler, Poet

"Wealth stays with us a little moment if at all: only our characters are steadfast, not our gold"

Euripides, Poet

"Characters do not change. Opinions alter, but characters are only developed"

Benjamin Disraeli, Statesman

"Homer's whole language, the language in which he lived, the language that he breathed, because he never saw it, or certainly those who formed his tradition never saw it, in characters on the pages. It was all on the tongue and in the ear"

Robert Fitzgerald, Author

"The Little Friend is a long book. It's also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story"

Donna Tartt, Novelist

"So if you want to have a great video game-based movie you have to keep the mood of the game, use the normal character setup - but you have to flesh out the story and provide more background for the characters"

Uwe Boll, Director

"I can create countries just as I can create the actions of my characters. That is why a lot of travel seems to me a waste of time"

Jerzy Kosinski, Novelist

"The way I write is that I'll actually have a conversation out loud with myself. In a weird way, I just kind of get schizophrenic and play two characters"

Zach Braff, Actor

"I put heavy emphasis on the characters"

Keenen Ivory Wayans, Comedian

"From beginning to end it's about keeping the energy and the intensity of the story and not doing too much and not doing too little, but just enough so people stay interested and stay involved in the characters"

Deborah Cox, Musician

"Heart is what drives us and determines our fate. That is what I need for my characters in my books: a passionate heart. I need mavericks, dissidents, adventurers, outsiders and rebels, who ask questions, bend the rules and take risks"

Isabel Allende, Writer

"Other people, including me, have written books with main characters who were old and rich. Or old and brilliant. Old sages, old wizards, old rich people"

Elizabeth Moon, Author

"They weren't impatient for the boys to turn into cartoons again. They awarded sympathy, gave compassion. Because deep down they had found parts of themselves in the characters. You said it George"

Audrey Meadows, Actress

"I'm always willing to endure humiliation on behalf of my characters"

Ben Stiller, Comedian

"And I have to credit David Jacobs with the opportunities he gave me. He was totally into sharing the creation of characters. David put together a show that told the story of people over many years' time and that was greatly enjoyable. Though nowadays that is frowned upon"

William Devane, Actor

"I plot the first 5 or 6 chapters quite minutely, and also the end. So I know where I am going but not how I'm going to get there, which gives characters the chance to develop organically, as happens in real life as you get to know a person"

Joanna Trollope, Novelist

"I think for anybody reading the book they're going to get an idea in their heads of all those characters, and I think that once that gets fixed, it's quite hard to shake"

Hugh Dancy, Actor

"The language fictional characters use is chosen for effect, at least if the author is concentrating"

John M. Ford, Writer

"I think in Vice and American Me I played very silent, rigid characters and people remember them"

Edward James Olmos, Actor

"Because they feel that without them telling you to do this, you wouldn't have had the characters that you have, you wouldn't have the book that you have"

Dan DeCarlo, Cartoonist

"I don't understand labels. I don't need anybody to tell me I'm Latina or black or anything else. I've played characters that were written for Caucasian females, I just want to be given the same consideration as everybody else, and so far that has been happening"

Zoe Saldana, Actor

"With all of the qualities of the scene-setting, the dialogue, the place and time and the time and place in which your characters move. And I want to move with the characters, move with them and describe the world in which they are living"

Gay Talese, Author

"My films do have characters who have trouble escaping the world around them"

Lasse Hallstrom, Director

"Well, the years from 10 to 20, when your body, mind and everything is like changing every five minutes, can be pretty torturing. And most of the interesting characters, I think, are somewhat tortured or torturous. I'm 20 now, so I'm only just an adult"

Anna Paquin, Actress

"One of the things that makes Hamlet unique among Shakespeare's characters is his courage to face up to the darker elements of his personality"

Kenneth Branagh, Actor

"A great novel is concerned primarily with the interior lives of its characters as they respond to the inconvenient narratives that fate imposes on them. Movie adaptations of these monumental fictions often fail because they become mere exercises in interior decoration"

Richard Schickel, Author

"I think it's a short story writer's duty, as well as writing well about emotions and characters, to write story"

Eric Brown, Writer

"Every man has three characters - that which he exhibits, that which he has, and that which he thinks he has"

Alphonse Karr, Critic

"My characters aren't losers. They're rebels. They win by their refusal to play by everyone else's rules"

Harold Ramis, Actor

"High aims form high characters, and great objects bring out great minds"

Tryon Edwards, Theologian

"I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies"

Oscar Wilde, Dramatist

"If women were particular about men's characters, they would never get married at all"

George Bernard Shaw, Dramatist

"Trial. A formal inquiry designed to prove and put upon record the blameless characters of judges, advocates and jurors"

Ambrose Bierce, Journalist

"Neither sex, without some fertilization of the complimentary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavor"

Jean-Paul Sartre, Philosopher

"Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars"

Kahlil Gibran, Poet

"When written in Chinese, the word "crisis" is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity"

John F. Kennedy, President

"Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self"

W. H. Auden, Poet

"If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats"

Richard Bach, Novelist

"I try to always stretch myself to fit the characters that have been presented"

Kathy Bates, Actress

"All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us"

Immanuel Kant, Philosopher

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