Characters Quotes

"In writing a series of stories about the same characters, plan the whole series in advance in some detail, to avoid contradictions and inconsistencies"

L. Sprague de Camp, Author

"We've carried that over into the visual development as well. We've designed quite an exotic cast of characters, but the last thing we want is to dictate to the players how their PCs should look. What we want to do is inspire"

Sam Wood, Director

"I came across awful characters when I got some kind of status and came to Hollywood. Then you have directors trying to sleep with you, assuming that you will do things because of the way you dress"

Stacey Dash, Actress

"The thing that I like about the way characters are written on the show these days is that nobody's perfect. Everyone has made a lot of mistakes and bad choices"

Crystal Chappell, Actress

"An actor is an actor is an actor. The less personality an actor has off stage the better. A blank canvas on which to draw the characters he plays"

Arthur Lowe, Actor

"One of the ways I think I gain fodder for characters is by watching people"

Edie Falco, Actress

"As different as me and Sigourney look is as different as these two characters are. I'm not filling her shoes. I'm doing a part that has the same monsters, but it's a completely different movie"

Sanaa Lathan, Actress

"It's hard to know whether certain characters come to life or not, they either come to have their own life or they don't. I've written many things in which the characters just remain inert"

Neil Jordan, Director

"But what I did think would be interesting is if we created a fictitious story of our own, and then took these stories that we had collected and assigned them to characters who would be played by actors"

Jim McKay, Journalist

"I like playing flawed characters, people who aren't perfect"

Tom Berenger, Actor

"I think people throughout the world identify with my characters"

Sidney Sheldon, Novelist

"Typically in horror films the character just services the plot, and you really are just going from 'point a' to 'point b,' just so that you can end up at 'point c.' They are just sort of stick characters. That's just not interesting to me"

Kevin Williamson, Author

"I couldn't do any of my other characters, you know? But I could have done the lady. Church Lady's Malibu Beach party is an idea I have for a movie, too. Yes"

Dana Carvey, Comedian

"The more varied the characters, the better, as far as I'm concerned"

Tim Roth, Actor

"You treat characters like people you meet in life-friends or mentors"

Wes Bentley, Actor

"I think good radio often uses the techniques of fiction: characters, scenes, a big urgent emotional question. And as in the best fiction, tone counts for a lot"

Ira Glass, Journalist

"Getting to meet people that I've admired my entire life, and getting to meet them in such a way where they're coming in to play completely different characters than I had ever seen them do is just wonderful"

Will Friedle, Actor

"When I first started acting, I started in opera and had a great desire to play grand, tragic characters. I got sidetracked in musical theater and ended up doing a lot of comedy"

Leslie Easterbrook, Actress

"My characters have undergone the same process of simplification as the colors. Now that they have been simplified, they appear more human and alive than if they had been represented in all their details"

Joan Miro, Artist

"In the theater, characters have to cut the umbilical cord from the writer and talk in their own voices"

Irwin Shaw, Novelist

"I don't understand that, because I think that what people like most about the show is that they recognize themselves in the characters and their problems, so the more believable the family is, the more we can draw the audience in"

Patricia Richardson, Actress

"Magneto has a whole lot of complexity to him. Emotionally, he's coming from a very damaged place. I like the ambivalence of it. I want the audience leaving the theater wondering, asking the questions themselves rather than being spoon-fed like a lot of these super-villain characters"

Michael Fassbender, Actor

"Ninety percent of video game AI really is pretty damn bad. I think that's actually why it's so much fun to shoot things. Because the AI is so bad and the characters are so annoying"

Matthew Perry, Actor

"The audience has to understand that if the film is going to have any meaning for them. If they are going to empathize with the characters, they have to visualize the process of concentration involved in making every move"

Conrad Hall, Artist

"In particular, people have trouble understanding where I stand in relation to my characters, and very often this gets reduced to me making vicious fun of them"

Todd Solondz, Writer

"No novel is a clone of any preceding one, though with a background cast of characters and things that has grown to thousands, there are many familiar aspects"

Piers Anthony, Writer

"I'll write maybe one long paragraph describing the events, then a page or two breaking the events into chapters, and then reams of pages delving into my characters. After that, I'm ready to begin"

Anne Tyler, Novelist

"Look at the Coen brothers. All their minor characters are as interesting as their protagonists. If the smaller characters are well-written, the whole world of the film becomes enriched. It's not the size of the thing, but the detail"

Brendan Gleeson, Actor

"I'm a neurotic New York Jew by birth. Creating characters is second nature to me"

Len Wein, Cartoonist

"Acting allows me to explore new worlds, to discover characters by delving into their lives, and ultimately to become someone else entirely"

Pierce Brosnan, Actor

"I like them all - I don't always approve. I see myself as a sort of benevolent uncle to these characters, and I can see why they do what they do; sometimes they make some mistakes, but at heart I think they're decent"

Patrick Marber, Writer

"Always when I directed the play, I was always trying to cast people not who were necessarily like the characters, but people who I felt had the essential component that the character had, some kind of soul for it"

Patrick Marber, Writer

"I love playing different characters all the time, so I'm concentrating on doing other stuff"

Monica Keena, Actress

"The great mystery is why robots come off so well in science-fiction films when the human characters are often so astoundingly wooden"

John Podhoretz, Writer

"Real-life people are often the hardest to play, people that you recreate who have actually lived, because you have to live up to people's knowledge of those characters"

Derek Jacobi, Actor

"I expect that any day now, I will have said all I have to say; I'll have used up all my characters, and then I'll be free to get on with my real life"

Anne Tyler, Novelist

"I consciously try to end my novels at a point where I won't have to wonder about my characters ever again"

Anne Tyler, Novelist

"Your characters have to remain innocent of what your picture is after"

Douglas Sirk, Director

"I always believed in my characters. I lived them"

Irene Dunne, Actress

"I don't like to read novels where the novelist tells me what to think about the situation and the characters. I prefer to discover for myself"

Frederick Wiseman, Director

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