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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"Sometimes I'll be fifty, sixty pages into something and I'll still be calling a character "X." I don't have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking. Then I start to love them. By the time I finish the book, I love them so much that I want to stay with them. I don't want to leave them ever."
"Sometimes an actor performs a character, but sometimes an actor just performs. With writing, I don't think it's performing a character, really, if the character you're performing is yourself. I don't see that as playing a role. It's just appearing in public."
"Choose your words carefully. They reveal your inner character."
"Adversity gives you the opportunity to exhibit godly character."
"I've always wanted to play a soldier and I'd never taken on a character where I'm the happy-go-lucky protagonist. I've played a lot of jerks recently."
"With any character, the main objective is to bring authenticity to the role."
"I do have characters who are more well known than I am, which suits me fine."
"New York is the greatest character actor ever. Any film that is shot in New York is elevated by the city."
"I love this book! Cathy Malkasian's Percy Gloom swirls with echoes of cartoon landscapes from the past and present. You can almost hear Percy Gloom's meek, docile little voice. Her writing is so full of wit and charm that we, like the title character, walk dutifully to the edge and fall in. And like Percy, we are rewarded equally with night terrors and secret treasures."
"In later life, as in earlier, only a few persons influence the formation of our character; the multitude pass us by like a distant army. One friend, one teacher, one beloved, one club, one dining table, one work table are the means by which one's nation and the spirit of one's nation affect the individual."
"I sometimes think I should like to give up business entirely. The care and worriment attending large business interests are very great, but besides that fact the manner in which motives are impugned and characters assailed is most unpleasant"
"It's difficult to get away from the shadow of a TV character."
"In acting class, teachers talk about how the 'givens' of a situation help define a character."
"Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world's a sage."
"Writer's block to me is where you stop because you're afraid to go forward because you're not sure of what really should be happening next and you think, my gosh, if I choose this... you've got a hundred millions of avenues you could possibly go down but it's all an assess of characters."
"For the devil is better pleased with coarse blockheads and with folks who are useful to nobody; because where such characters abound, then things do not go on prosperously here on earth."
"The characters Im most emotionally involved with are like friends you leave behind when you move away. You dont see them regularly anymore, but you still love them and keep in touch."
"Others are to us like the characters in fiction, eternal and incorrigible; the surprises they give us turn out in the end to have been predictable and unexpected variations on the theme of being themselves."
"The strongest argument for the un-materialistic character of American life is the fact that we tolerate conditions that are, from a materialistic point of view, intolerable. ... No nation with any sense of material well-being would endure the food we eat, the cramped apartments we live in, the noise, the traffic, the crowded subways and buses. American life, in large cities, at any rate, is a perpetual assault on the senses and the nerves."
"The strongest argument for the un-materialistic character of American life is that we tolerate conditions that are, from a materialistic point of view, intolerable."
