Characters Quotes

"Watergate is an immensely complicated scandal with a cast of characters as varied as a Tolstoy novel"

"I tell my students you have an absolute right to write about people you know and love. You do. But the kicker is you have a responsibility to make the characters large enough that you will not have sinned against them"

Dorothy Allison, Writer

"When you throw punches at actors, you stop, you pull it, and it looks like you pulled it. When you throw punches at cartoon characters, they are not there, so you can swing through. It looks like you really decked them"

Brendan Fraser, Actor

"My characters always like themselves"

Amy Sedaris, Actress

"I was always cutting dialogue out when we were rehearsing, and when I produced movies, too. I felt that people don't say things in life - they act, they do things. I always wanted my characters doing, rather than saying what they were doing - which was redundant"

Donna Mills, Actress

"Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes and always count their change when it is handed to them"

Catherine Drinker Bowen, Writer

"I admire directors so much, I find them incredible: they manage such a huge number of people of different characters, think of the money involved"

Catherine Deneuve, Actress

"Whatever your relationship is to your sacred tradition in the West, you have some relationship to the Bible if only through the names of the characters"

Anita Diament, Author

"I write easily, let's put it that way. And in a novel particularly, the characters take over. And they tell me what to say and they tell me what they're doing. And I'm a third of the way into a novel and then I just let the characters finish it for me"

Andrew Greeley, Clergyman

"Obsession led me to write. It's been that way with every book I've ever written. I become completely consumed by a theme, by characters, by a desire to meet a challenge"

Anne Rice, Novelist

"I'm usually working on my own mythology, my own realm of created characters. Stories in mythology inspire me, though I may not be conscious of it"

Anne Rice, Novelist

"We have defined these characters - people always expect to see me in a pencil skirt. When they see me out of one - much like when they see Jon Hamm's hair when it isn't slick - they say, 'Wait a minute, you're all 2010!'"

Christina Hendricks, Actress

"After a while, the characters I'm writing begin to feel real to me. That's when I know I'm heading in the right direction"

Alice Hoffman, Author

"None of the characters I've played are really like me. That would be boring. That wouldn't be acting"

Anna Paquin, Actress

"I'm not comfortable being around too many people. I don't like being out in public too much. I don't like going to bars. I don't like doing celebrity stuff. So most of the characters I play are people who don't always feel comfortable beyond their small circle of friends"

Adam Sandler, Actor

"Truly great actors carry their characters in silence with them. They communicate without words the relationships that predate the movie"

Sam Mendes, Director

"The characters are trapped within the lifestyle. It's about what goes on before the movie starts"

Sam Mendes, Director

"Television provides the opportunity for an ongoing story - the opportunity to meld the cast and the characters and a world, and to spend more time there"

David Lynch, Director

"At first I was always cast as the girlfriend. It was a long time before I got to play characters who were people"

Jacqueline Bisset, Actress

"Everyone in those days expected that art students were wild, licentious characters. We didn't know how to be, but we sure were anxious to learn"

Norman Rockwell, Artist

"The vampire was a complete change from the usual romantic characters I was playing, but it was a success"

Bela Lugosi, Actor

"It's hard to leave behind scenes and characters I am in love with"

John Harrison, Inventor

"And when I'm writing, I write a lot anyway. I might write pages and pages of conversation between characters that don't necessarily end up in the book, or in the story I'm working on, because they're simply my way of getting to know the characters"

Norton Juster, Architect

"Kitchens are hard environments, and they form incredibly strong characters"

Gordon Ramsay, Chef

"My characters are fictional. I get ideas from real people, sometimes, but my characters always exist only in my head"

S. E. Hinton, Writer

"That's true, you don't want to let anybody down and here are millions of people who've been waiting for their favorite characters to be brought to life and you don't want to disappoint"

Rebecca Romijn, Actress

"You've either got to find a way to make your continuing characters insteresting without making them maudlin or overwrought, or you've got to put more emphasis on the suspects"

Jane Haddam, Writer

"Normally, I name my characters after famous comedians"

Paula Danziger, Author

"I like repressed characters. That gives me a lot of freedom to make a lot of different choices through subtleties"

Jeremy Renner, Actor

"Essentially and most simply put, plot is what the characters do to deal with the situation they are in. It is a logical sequence of events that grow from an initial incident that alters the status quo of the characters"

Elizabeth George, Author

"I had no intention of pursuing either the characters or the setting further"

Stephen R. Donaldson, Writer

"Part of the success of the show is that the audience sees themselves in the characters, becomes the characters. The more they inhabit the characters, the more they see"

Bebe Neuwirth, Actress

"I directed 24's pilot. I felt we should follow the characters around as if we were a documentary crew, using available light, hand-held cameras, split screens, sound that isn't always what it should be, to suit the reality of the premise"

Stephen Hopkins

"I always get inspiration from whatever characters say about my character"

Robert Englund, Actor

"In horror, character development is often pushed aside in favor of the shock value. The best genre movies to me are movies like The Shining. You had a connection to the characters in that film"

Joshua Leonard, Actor

"It always takes awhile to find out who the characters are"

Rene Auberjonois, Actor

"Many novelists take well-defined, precise characters, whose stories are sometimes of mediocre interest, and place them in an important historical context, which remains secondary in spite of everything"

Raymond Queneau, Poet

"In creating the Harry Potter artwork, I try to bring a certain amount of realism and believability to the characters and setting, but still add an element of wonder and the unknown"

Mary Grandpre

"Because I just loved to spend two years of my life in the company of Andy Kaufman and other characters"

Milos Forman, Director

"I only work with actors who take full responsibility for their characters"

Jonathan Demme, Director

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