"Historical fiction is not history. You're blending real events and actual historical personages with characters of your own creation."
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Character quotes
Character
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Character quotes (page 149 of 739)
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"I prefer to work with grey characters rather than black and white."
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"As Faulkner says, all of us have the capacity in us for great good and for great evil, for love but also for hate. I wanted to write those kinds of complex character in a fantasy, and not just have all the good people get together to fight the bad guy."
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"Tolkien made the wrong choice when he brought Gandalf back. Screw Gandalf. He had a great death and the characters should have had to go on without him."
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"The truth of it is, writers do have peculiar relationships with their characters. They are our children in more senses than one. They are born of our imaginations, carry much of ourselves in them, and embody whatever dreams we dream of immortality."
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"I have a huge emotional attachment to characters I've created, especially the viewpoint characters."
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"I've always preferred writing about grey characters and human characters. Whether they are giants or elves or dwarves, or whatever they are, they're still human, and the human heart is still in conflict with the self."
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"I think my very earliest stories were all intellectual exercises and I was writing from experiences I had never had about characters who were about an inch deep."
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"I always give my students exercises where they really have to open a vein and bleed all over the paper and that's the way you get the important characters. Sooner or later every writer worth reading writes a story his mother wouldn't read and having to get that stuff out is part of one's growth as a writer."
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"I'm fond of all my characters so every time one doesn't make the cut I'm a little disappointed although I understand it."
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"The traveller must be somebody and come from somewhere, so that his definite character and moral traditions may supply an organ and a point of comparison for his observations."
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"Manhood and sagacity ripen of themselves; it suffices not to repress or distort them."
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"The tribute that is due to the talents, the rectitude, and the patriotism which adorn the characters selected to devise and adopt them. In these honorable qualifications, I behold the surest pledges, that as on one side, no local prejudices, or attachments; no seperate views, nor party animosities, will misdirect the comprehensive and equal eye which ought to watch over this great assemblage of communities and interests: so, on another, that the foundations of our National policy will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality..."
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"Even respectable characters speak of a monarchical form of government without horror."
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"Nothing short of self-respect and that justice which is essential to a national character ought to involve us in war."
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"If there was the same propensity in mankind for investigating the motives, as there is for censuring the conduct, of public characters, it would be found that the censure so freely bestowed is oftentimes unmerited and uncharitable."
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"[T]he first transactions of a nation, like those of an individual upon his first entrance into life make the deepest impression, and are to form the leading traits in its character."
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"When I start a movie, I already feel like I'm in it. I'm not a jobbing actor anymore; most of the films I do, I'm involved with development. Some, I've taken from scratch, and worked so heavily on the script, I'm embodying a lot of the character by the time I even get close to filming, because I've asked so many of the questions that I do. There is nothing better than being able to ask all the questions, do all the work. It's when you let it go that you fly."
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"So many actors get caught up in their technique, and to be honest, I see it really getting in the way. I see them forcing things. I definitely do my best work when I'm free of that. But I think as an actor, I work really hard in preparing the roles. I spend like 90 percent of my waking moments walking around thinking: "What does this character do? What is his relationship with so-and-so?" Always, really. Too much!"
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"One thing I've learned as an actor as well as a producer is to trust my own instinct. When I first started acting I would sometimes have ideas about certain things, whether it's a scene, or a character or certain dialogue, that wouldn't be followed. I was never in a position to have the power to press the matter. Sometimes it wasn't even about my character. But I'd watch the movie afterwards and think I was right."
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