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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"No author can create a character out of nothing. He must have a model to give him a starting point; but then his imagination goes to work, he builds him up, adding a trait here, a trait there, which his model did not possess."
"The normal is what you find but rarely. The normal is an ideal. It is a picture that one fabricates of the average characteristics of men, and to find them all in a single man is hardly to be expected."
"People do tell a writer things that they don't tell others. I don't know why, unless it is that having read one or two of his books they feel on peculiarly intimate terms with him; or it may be that they dramatize themselves and, seeing themselves as it were as characters in a novel, are ready to be as open with him as they imagine the characters of his invention are."
"The value of culture is its effect on character. It avails nothing unless it ennobles and strengthens that. Its use is for life. Its aim is not beauty but goodness."
"It has amazed me that the most incongruous traits should exist in the same person and, for all that, yield a plausible harmony."
"I've always been very strong minded on character-based fights and character-based action. If you take the character out of the action and you just shoot it as an action sequence, the audience starts to lose connection."
"I'm so critical, especially of the movies I do. If the movie flows and I buy it, that's important. Beyond it working, if I buy the character, especially if I'm close to the character."
"The more we can put the camera in a better place, the more we can take the audience on a more extreme journey with that character."
"The way that you have cut the film, you can take the audience out of the action if it becomes evident that there is a stunt double doing it rather than the actor. I'd rather stay with the character and the story point behind the fight, rather than cutting to a wide angle of the fight."
"Everything today is such a massive visual show. It's very rare to get a film where the characters are raw and real - and you can take people back to where they are watching live cinema. With character-driven action. Not visual-driven action."
"There's no such thing as life; or if there is, It is faster than the weather, faster than Any character. It is more than any scene: Of the guillotine or of any glamorous hanging."
"It gives a man character as a poet to have a daily contact with a job. I doubt whether I've lost a thing by leading an exceedingly regular and disciplined life."
"I take great pride in the artistic development of cartoons. Our characters are made to go through emotions."
"When you do films that have multiple sequels, you develop a character for a film."
"But things such as 'Harry Potter', all I can do is shape my character, seek the director's approval on that, and basically take it from there. Professor Flitwick in 'Harry Potter', I kind of defined how I saw him from reading the book, and luckily that matched up with the director's vision."
"When I came up with the character of Wicket for 'Return Of The Jedi', which was my first film, I was a kid of 11 years old, and I basically was playing a very young Ewok."
"Who is the ultimate dreamer? Call it as you will: God, higher consciousness, Krishna, spirit, whatever pleases you. .. One dream, one dreamer, billions of embodied characters acting out that one dream. .. Your true essence is that you are part and parcel of the one big dream."
"There's nothing like being in fashion. A man that has once got his character up for a wit is always sure of a laugh, say what he may. He may utter as much nonsense as he pleases, and all will pass current. No one stops to question the coin of a rich man; but a poor devil cannot pass off either a joke or a guinea without its being examined on both sides. Wit and coin are always doubted with a threadbare coat."
"There is no character in the comedy of human life more difficult to play well than that of an old bachelor."
"There is a certain artificial polish, a commonplace vivacity acquired by perpetually mingling in the beau monde; which, in the commerce of world, supplies the place of natural suavity and good-humour, but is purchased at the expense of all original and sterling traits of character."
