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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"When intellectual leaders fail to foster the best in the mixed, unformed, vacillating character of people at large, the thugs are sure to bring out the worst. When the ablest men turn into cowards, the average men turn into brutes."
"I write - and read - for the sake of the story... My basic test for any story is: 'Would I want to meet these characters and observe these events in real life? Is this story an experience worth living through for its own sake? Is the pleasure of contemplating these characters an end itself?"
"Even in dialogue, your own style rules your selection. Do not give yourself a blank check of this kind: 'I'll merely reproduce what I think a character like so-and-so would say.' You have to reproduce it in the way your literary premises dictate."
"He foresaw that she would be very much more useful to him in the character of a free woman."
"If the book is finished—published and on the shelf—I do not think of revising it. But if I'm not finished psychologically with characters, they will recur, either as themselves or as new, slightly altered manifestations, and their same issues will reappear. It's a matter of the subject and emotional investment and my own obsessive thinking about various issues It's an unconscious process. To say that a single story is not done isn't quite true. A story can be finished and judged successful or not by somebody else, but if the issue is not done for me, I can count on its reappearance."
"When characters are drifting away from the "correct road", or in fact from any road they were supposed to follow, they lose control, they find other goals...and possibly their real selves. All these moments of changes, of self-questioning, are like an engine to the films I make - that's where lie the dynamics I'm interested in as a director."
"I feel like you can't get an audience to like your character if she's actually cool, but you can if she's trying to be cool and sometimes fails."
"I fall in love with characters when they're out of their element or are uncomfortable and you really feel for them in a knee-jerk sympathetic way."
"Acting is not pretending or lying. It's finding a side of yourself that's the character and ignoring your other sides. And there's a side of me that wonders what's wrong with being completely honest."
"Every character is a part of you and a part of the character that you are going to evolve into that you are not yet."
"I like to hide behind the characters I play."
"I went through a period when I felt my film characters were having more fun than I was. It might partly explain why I ended up tattooed or doing certain extreme things in my life."
"I notice that my characters go out to dinner and have fun and take these great trips, but I spend so much time on their lives, I don’t have much of a personal life of my own. I have to sort of remember to fill out that little notebook on me."
"There was a time when I was really going to give up acting-- right after Foxfire. I was trying to find characters with a certain strength and things going on, but I was always disappointed. Wallace was the first thing I did where I felt their ideas were better than mine."
"I think I was probably able to flip characters in my head as if I was playing different roles in order to write the different people because you kind of have to be one person, and inhabit him and write from his voice and be her and write her voice. So I think that helped."
"I wasn't into fairytales when I was little. I was of the generation of the earlier Disney films where many of the female characters, with the exception of the Maleficent's, were not little girls that I admired... the little princesses. They weren't characters that I identified with. I think that's very different now for my girls and more recent films."
"I think actors, because we're in the world of the characters and the movie, are more isolated, and it always really fun to wake up and be a family with the entire crew."
"I started in comedy when I first started as an actor on stage and doing improvisational theater and stuff like that. So a lot of people who know me know that sort of side of me. But I got the roles that I got as an young actor kind of steered me in a different direction, which were, at times, darker characters. And so comedy was not something that came easy for people to think of my in those terms."
"Marvel has this tradition, and I think that Sony has this tradition too, of hiring directors for Spider-Man who are dramatic directors. That are directors who are interested in human beings, in characters, in drama, and who are really good with actors. That kind of feels like a Spider-Man director to me. And because Spider-Man is always as big as the films that are being made at Marvel, it always is character and story. You can never take that out."
"Comic book characters are characters who wear costumes. They're not necessarily different than other characters. The trend I think that you're seeing are comic book movies, at least the ones that Marvel makes, don't have comic book stories. They have dramatic human stories."
