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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"People had been so attached to the Diane [Cheers] character that audiences and producers found it difficult to think of me in any other terms. It took some time before people would consider me for other parts."
"Pity can purge us of hostility and arouse feelings of identification with the characters, but it can also be a consoling reassurance which leads us to believe that we have understood, and that, in pitying, we have even done something to right a wrong."
"Even my novels offer passages in which the major character is imagined as a writer. In Joss and Gold, Li An is a business writer who edits her company's weekly public relations magazine. And in Sister Swing, Suyin writes human interest stories for a free, local community paper, The Asian Time."
"In a way, this kind of insight or recognition often permeates the way I think of character, how I plot action, and the way in which I use imagery, seeing binaries as false."
"It is true that my characters have sex."
"Sport strips away personality, letting the white bone of character shine through. Sport gives players an opportunity to know and test themselves. The great difference between sport and art is that sport, like a sonnet, forces beauty within its own system. Art, on the other hand, cyclically destroys boundaries and breaks free."
"I think the reason I choose the comic approach so often is because it's harder, therefore affording me the opportunity to show off. Also, a comic vision is my natural world view, but I've grown up in spite of myself and I can pass the comic twist if it detracts from what the characters need. Yes, the life of a saint is hard."
"Tragedy massages the human ego even as comedy deflates it. ... Tragedy pits us against large foes and the trip wire is our own character. ... In comedy we fall afoul of one another. Comedy depends on social life, on our behavior in groups. In tragedy you can observe one human against the gods. In comedy it's one human versus other humans and often one man (or woman if I'm writing it) against her own worst impulses."
"I had to learn the image is not the word, which is a jolt for a literary soul. But it has served me well in terms of understanding plot, in terms of watching actors develop characters."
"Each performance and each film is what it is. It's right and belongs within that moment. You look at it and try to make it fit your particular part of your character and your particular film."
"I'd love to do a Columbo-type detective character in a series."
"Every time I feel that I really hit critical mass and I'm in the right place is when I feel like the director and I become a third thing, and that's the character."
"The audience can feel the subtleties of the characters."
"I've just finished reading a book about the brilliant Margaret Rutherford. She wasn't a beauty, but inside she was absolutely blazing and passionate about her work. She's one of those life-affirming characters."
"Homer's whole language, the language in which he lived, the language that he breathed, because he never saw it, or certainly those who formed his tradition never saw it, in characters on the pages. It was all on the tongue and in the ear."
"I tend to favour films that have multiple plot and story lines, multiple characters and ensemble pieces."
"When people lose faith in the natural goodness of the human character, the lack of trust in spiritual goodness, that is one reason why corruption has become so widespread today."
"Among the fearless soldiers that fight for your victory in life, character has no equal."
"Character is blazing sunshine in the soul's abode, the body."
"A perfect society is built upon mutual trust. Character is the source of that trust."
