Characters Quotes: Timeless Wisdom from Memorable Personalities

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

"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 put heavy emphasis on the characters"

Keenen Ivory Wayans, Comedian

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

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

Euripides, Poet

"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

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

W. H. Auden, Poet

"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

"I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really"

Tennessee Williams, Dramatist

"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

"I have a cheat-sheet for each one of my characters about their personality, the way they look, etc. So there is no possible way that I could have writer's block"

R. L. Stine, Writer

"All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures. It is the very nature of fantasy and fable"

Walt Disney, Cartoonist

"We have created characters and animated them in the dimension of depth, revealing through them to our perturbed world that the things we have in common far outnumber and outweigh those that divide us"

Walt Disney, Cartoonist

"I try to build a full personality for each of our cartoon characters - to make them personalities"

Walt Disney, Cartoonist

"The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioned our characters in the wrong way"

William James, Philosopher

"I start drawing, and eventually the characters involve themselves in a situation. Then in the end, I go back and try to cut out most of the preachments"

Dr. Seuss, Writer

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

Samuel Butler, 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

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