Characters Quotes: Timeless Wisdom from Memorable Personalities (Page 2)

"When you're working with a smaller budget I suppose one of the things that has to be in your mind when you are writing is that you have to keep the characters down to a minimum"

Atom Egoyan, Director

"They're all based on factual characters. Well, a good amount of them. That's why I was attracted to this genre anyways, because these characters are so large and cartoonish, they're like caricatures, I just felt that there had to be a film made about them"

Guy Ritchie, Director

"The man I lived with is a Christian, so I would talk to him about it. What would this person do in the Bible? What's the story around this person? Generally, when people talk about characters in the Bible, there's one thing they're known for, like Job"

Lucinda Williams, Musician

"When you have an idea for a story, you want those characters to reach as many people as you can. I think you normally think of prose as a way of doing that. It fits our time, the culture"

Robert Morgan, Soldier

"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

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

Edward James Olmos, 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, Journalist

"I put heavy emphasis on the characters"

Keenen Ivory Wayans, Comedian

"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

"In each of my characters there is a little of me. Not strictly autobiographical but a little piece of my soul"

Dario Argento, Director

"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

"006 was such an interesting character and the film really explored his friendship with Bond and how it all went wrong, so it was a very personal journey for both characters"

Sean Bean, 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

"It's kind of ironic that the two sports with the greatest characters, boxing and horse racing, have both been on the decline. In both cases it's for the lack of a suitable hero"

Dick Schaap, Journalist

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

Ben Stiller, Comedian

"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

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

Tryon Edwards, Theologian

"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

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

Lasse Hallstrom, Director

"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

"The characters emerge from my rather twisted mind. That's another enjoyable part of the job making stuff up"

Jonathan Kellerman, Psychologist

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

George Bernard Shaw, Dramatist

"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

"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

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

Ambrose Bierce, Journalist

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

W. H. Auden, Poet

"When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature"

Ernest Hemingway, Novelist

"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 don't need all that much - I just need to know who my characters are and what kind of jam they're going to get into, and I'll write myself out of their jam"

Richard Price, Writer

"For our vanity is such that we hold our own characters immutable, and we are slow to acknowledge that they have changed, even for the better"

E. M. Forster, Novelist

"Now, all the movies are for teenagers. It's very difficult for an actress to find really deep, beautiful characters to play"

Monica Bellucci, Actress

"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

"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 don't think I'm like any of the characters I've played - they're all really far from who I am"

Christian Bale, Actor

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

Kathy Bates, Actress

"Since I was there in the very beginning, I know the history of the characters. So, I make comments about the tone and sometimes remind the writers that we've done that before"

Matt Groening, Cartoonist

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Characters Quotes

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