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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"I mean PJ - James Ransone - he was a friend of mine, he probably heard all this stuff, but for the rest of the cast [Valley of Violence], we mostly just talked about their characters and things like that. That was the business at hand."
"I love writing about Oklahoma. I love writing Oklahoma characters; I love playing Southwestern characters."
"When something arrives, you have no idea what's in it, which is good. And then, it's is the story leaps off the page at you and how your character functions within it. There could be just one scene and if it's wonderful, it doesn't matter how much you're working on it because you just want to be in it. It's really about what your character's day to day world looks like, and if you feel like that's something that's complete, and that you'd like to inhabit for awhile. You'll know by a couple of scenes in. If the character grabs you, you run with it."
"A conventional playwright tries to tell you more about the characters than they know about themselves."
"When you write a character and their dialogue, you can't help imagining how you would be acting if you were them. You kind of have to relate to all of them. It's the most personal thing I've ever done."
"If I have no connection with the character, then it's all fake - it's just blah, blah, blah."
"The Pixar people continuously amaze me. They come up with something that actually looks as though it takes place in this happy, real-world. Every plot line is not just plausible, but oddly authentic. The stories are full of adventure, humor and love. The characters are written with great human dimension. I don't know how they do it but they astound me."
"When you're in your early 20s, a lot of characters can be one or two dimensional. You want a role to substantiate the drama, as opposed to actually analyzing the psychology of a human being. That's what drew me to acting, particularly the contradictions in people."
"I always get role models, people from real life who've lived the lives of the characters, and talk it through together, me, them and the actor, a lot. That helps. We certainly have our disagreements. But in the end we trust each other."
"I'm drawn to dark characters, and to things that are really weighty."
"Every person has contributed to me as a human, but a lot of the characters I do are ones I created."
"You get to know a character that you play on-stage in a pretty profound way over a length of time. I don't want to sound highfalutin and say you become the character, you just start bringing more and more of yourself to the part until the character and actor, it's hard to tell them apart. It's some weird amalgam. In film, because of the period of time, I don't know that you ever get that deep into it."
"James Patterson has a way with female characters. He understands women in a way that a lot of male writers don't."
"I would love to do a period piece. That would be really cool. And also like to do something transformative and have to transform yourself physically to become that character. Any interesting, fun roles, I'm attracted to."
"In the sixties, in the middle sixties, suddenly comics became this hip thing, and college students and hippies were reading them. So I was one of them, and I started reading, basically it was the Marvel Renaissance at that point. It was all their new characters, Spiderman and the X-Men and the Fantastic Four."
"I'm not a character in any of my books."
"You got to constantly be in character."
"Some literature is knowledge, some is just data. But if I can get a "happy" ending - which is when for the characters I'm writing about, something happens that they move from wherever they are in the beginning to knowledge or wisdom, they know something they never would have acknowledged or realized if it hadn't been for my book - that for me is what literature does."
"Every single song has its own individual character and you can't treat each song the same way, because it wants to be treated differently and there are songs that are like scared birds that you have to sneak up on over the course of months in the woods."
"Both men and women today see marriage not as a way of creating character and community but as a way to reach personal life goals. They are looking for a marriage partner who will 'fulfill their emotional, sexual, and spiritual desires.' And that creates an extreme idealism that in turn leads to a deep pessimism that you will ever find the right person to marry."
