Character quotes
14.8K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside character — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"In this consists the difference between the character of a miser and that of a person of exact economy and assiduity. The one is anxious about small matters for their own sake; the other attends to them only in consequence of the scheme of life which he has laid down to himself."
"The writer by nature of his profession is a dreamer and a conscious dreamer. He must imagine, and imagination takes humility, love and great courage. How can you create a character without live and the struggle that goes with love?"
"It was fun yet challenging to play the dual roles. I'm a really nice guy, and the character [of Dubious] is egocentric and hard-edged, so I had to pull out the negative aspects of me to attribute to the role."
"When I was eight years old, I played a story game with my younger brother and sister to help them fall asleep. The 'word-story game' was where they would choose a word and I would create a story. Acting and directing are similar to this game, where I am given the words then I fill in the life of the characters."
"Of course, no religious test for the presidency - every faith adds to our national character."
"A perfect character might be attended with the inconvenience of being envied and hated; and that a benevolent man should allow a few faults in himself, to keep his friends in countenance."
"Nothing is more important for the public wealth than to form and train youth in wisdom and virtue. Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom."
"As in the case of many of the stories that I've written I'm not trying to editorialize. I don't want there to be a message at the end of anything I write. Otherwise you wouldn't trust the characters. They'd feel less organic and more like puppets that are sharing the author's opinion."
"I think my leap into TV and movies and comics is in a way natural because I'm a visual storyteller. If you look at any one of my short stories or novels, they sort of unscroll cinematically. Every scene is concrete in my mind. I can walk around the room and pick things up. I can describe at length every feature on the character, though I might only supply a glimpse of this on the page. So if I'm writing color into that I'm also writing texture, I'm pushing the image more than anything else."
"I have a scenario but almost always it's entwined with at least one person to begin with. Then I sort of expand from there and I'm thinking about books novels. I've got these scrolls of paper that I hang up in my office and this is my idea room, my nightmare factory, and I have a big title at the top of the scroll and on the left hand side I have these character sketches on the characters, and then once I figure out who they are I can figure out what they want and once I figure out what they want I'm able to put obstacles in the way of that desire, and that's where plot springs from."
"Religion may become a fashion as well as anything else; and, when it does become so, it has as little to do, in those who thus hold it, with the heart and the character as any other fashion."
"I find that when I play reality-based characters, it is only as fun for me if I have a lot of time to do research. If I don't it just isn't exciting but if I do, it can be fun because I can learn about that person and the world that they live in and I can become somebody else"
"If I wasn't going through a thing where I was also being my characters offstage, uh, I'm much happier just wearing the most low-profile things that I can come up with just so I can get down the street."
"I think much has been made of this alter ego business. I mean, I actually stopped creating characters in 1975 - for albums, anyway."
"I think that my fascination with clothes generally was motivated by trying to create the characters for the stage."
"I thought that I could do some kind of vehicle involving rock musicals and presenting rock and characters and storyline in a completely different fashion."
"Mine is really - Ziggy Stardust, characters, "Let's Dance." That's me in the American."
"The character thing really is sort of, for me, personally, rather ancient history."
"I tend to think of fiction as being mainly about characters and human beings and inner experience, whereas essays can be much more expository and didactic and more about subjects or ideas."
"If some people read my fiction and see it as fundamentally about philosophical ideas, what it probably means is that these are pieces where the characters are not as alive and interesting as I meant them to be."
