"When I look at a character, whether he's good or bad, one scene or 10 scenes, I just have to find my way in."
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Character quotes
Character
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Character quotes (page 104 of 739)
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"For me, I always have to establish a reality for the character. In very actor-y terms, you just have to understand his reality."
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"I'm very comfortable writing in the first person; it dives into the character in a way that's difficult if you're writing in the third person."
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"There's a lot of me in it. But the character is more egotistical. I'm also egotistical, but not the way the character is. This guy is successful, he has everything, but his wife has left him. The most important value - love - is missing. What is wrong with this institution called 'marriage'? What is wrong with this institution called 'the pursuit of happiness'?"
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"What I can say is that all my characters are searching for their souls, because they are my mirrors. I'm someone who is constantly trying to understand my place in the world, and literature is the best way that I found in order to see myself."
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"Mankind, transmitting from generation to generation the legacy of accumulated vengeances, and pursuing with the feelings of duty the misery of their fellow-beings, have not failed to attribute to the Universal Cause a character analogous with their own. The image of this invisible, mysterious Being is more or less excellent and perfect resembles more or less its original in proportion to the perfection of the mind on which it is impressed."
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"Whatever may be his true and final destination, there is a spirit within him at enmity with nothingness and dissolution. This is the character of all life and being."
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"Quality of character doesn't make a leader, but the lack of it flaws the entire process."
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"By themselves, character and integrity do not accomplish anything. But their absence faults everything else."
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"The thought of the novelist lies not in the remarks of his characters or even in their introspection but in the plight he has invented for his characters - in the juxtaposition of those characters and in the lifelike ramifications of the ensemble they make: their density, their substantiality, their lived existence actualized in all its nuanced particulars, is in fact his thought metabolized."
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"Well, I think that in every character there are little bits and pieces of yourself."
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"There is no stronger test of a person's character than power and authority, exciting as they do every passion, and discovering every latent vice."
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"Character is inured habit."
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"It is circumstance and proper measure that give an action its character, and make it either good or bad."
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"I'm really attracted to strong women. Let me rephrase that, I'm really attracted to strong female characters."
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"I don't ever want to do the same character twice. Variety excites me."
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"A character is 2D, and then after I come in it becomes a 3D; it becomes alive."
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"In the theater the audience is generally riveted to a single angle of observation. The movie director, though, can rapidly shift from objective to subjective--and to any number of subjective points of view--and in so doing seem to pull the audience directly inside the frame of his picture, giving the spectator the sense of experiencing an action from the viewpoint of a participant. Identification of the viewer with the film character, then, can be much more intimate than the analogous situation in the theater."
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"Critics have found in the narrative a veneer of erudition that cloaks nothing more than a James Bond-style romp, albeit a highly addictive one. His publisher has described it as 'a thriller for people who don't like thrillers'. One newspaper put it thus: 'It is terribly written, its characters are cardboard cutouts, the dialogue is excruciating in places and, a bit like a computer manual, everything is overstated and repeated - but it is impossible to put the bloody thing down."
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"Writing is a solitary existence. Making a movie is controlled chaos - thousands of moving parts and people. Every decision is a compromise. If you're writing and you don't like how your character looks or talks, you just fix it. But in a movie, if there's something you don't like, that's tough."
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