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 once started a detective story to make moneybut I couldn't get the murder to take place! At the end of three chapters I was still describing the characters and the milieu, so I thought, this is not going to work. No corpse!"
"Sex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character."
"It may...be judged indecent in me to come forward on this occasion; but when I see a fellow-creature about to perish through the cowardice of her pretended friends, I wish to be allowed to speak, that I may say what I know of her character."
"Well, it's kind of like that classic sort of trajectory in this kind of movie where there's conflict and they're estranged and they kind of grow to love each other but they don't show it. Then at the end - it's kind of like that. But I think the characters are more interesting than that."
"I don't really ever think about whether or not I like the characters I'm playing. I'm more into the minutiae of their behaviour or what they're doing in a certain scene."
"As an actor I can sort of smell a duff note, that isn't full of that much conviction. My worst thing with directors is when I know more than them about the character."
"There are good characters and bad characters."
"When you do a film, you start to get the character, and then it disappears for a year before it's released and you get feedback."
"Not knowing what's happening, from script to script, as an actor and as a character, lends itself to the same tension and anxiety of not knowing what's happening."
"One of the most obvious parts of my character is the smile, and if I wasn't comfortable in myself then I wouldn't be able to smile so much."
"My own feeling is that the only possible reason for engaging in the hard labor of writing a novel, is that one is bothered by something one needs to understand, and can come to understand only through the characters in the imagined situation."
"My dad calls me 'Mac' a lot, from 'Mike Tyson's Punch Out' - Little Mac is the main character. I was obsessed. I can still beat Mike Tyson on 'Punch Out.'"
"I always choose my movie because of a director and a story and a, a character."
"You have this certain about of responsibility to play a fictitious character and you have a script that's guiding you and the other information of the custom department's choices, and the set department, "Where are you," and all those other pieces of information but you have to cull from your imagination the answer to all the unasked questions. And with a real person, there's someone to get that information from, perhaps."
"I do think comedy needs to be a living thing, but I think without a great script and fully realized characters, you cannot keep it living. Otherwise it just becomes long and rambling indulgent."
"Once you start writing a character visually, you're in trouble."
"It becomes more and more popular to call actors who play characters "character actors." But I've always been somebody who is much more invested in who I am playing than how they look."
"The climate informs the character."
"I'm certainly not shy, but I like playing it because I love those characters that are incredibly confident but really still a mess."
"I've grown up well, partly because there weren't great girls' literature - Nancy Drew, maybe - but there weren't things. So there was Huck Finn and "Spin And Marty." The boys characters were interesting and you lived through them when you're watching it."
