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 am definitely not a fashionista, I can't live up to that title, I don't want to. Sometimes I look like a slob, but I wouldn't do a job if I couldn't be involved in the style and wardrobe of my character."
"I cannot conceive why people will always mix up my own character and opinions with those of the imaginary beings which, as a poet, I have the right and liberty to draw."
"In general, I did what a lot of character actors do: I did it to get girls."
"Playing Destroyo, who was sort of a 'Silence Of The Lambs' type character, I'd say I was wearing about 50 pounds of rubber and foam rubber and makeup. But I had no idea who The Tick was. I'm not a big graphic-novel guy. I don't even know if 'The Tick' was a graphic novel!"
"It's the writer's job to stage confrontations, so the characters will say surprising and revealing things, and educate and entertain us all."
"Don't put anything into a story that does not reveal character or advance the action."
"Honest to God, Bill, the way things are going, all I can think of is that I'm a character in a book by somebody who wants to write about somebody who suffers all the time."
"I have become an enthusiast for the printed word again. I have to be that, I now understand, because I want to be a character in all of my works. I can do that in print. In a movie, somehow, the author always vanishes."
"Everything of mine which has been filmed so far has been one character short, and that character is me."
"I used my daughter's crayons for each main character. One end of the wallpaper was the beginning of the story, and the other end was the end, and then there was all that middle part, which was the middle."
"I play the sort of character who would sell his grandmother for career advancement, something I've come across a lot with actors."
"I think any role you need to play not so much transforms but I like to think of it as understanding the psychology of another character."
"As human beings, of course, we're all compromised and complex and contradictory and if a screenplay can express those contradictions within a character and if there's room for me to express them, that's a part I'd love to play, so much more than a character who is heroic and one-dimensional."
"the heart of religion is not altered states but altered traits of character. For me, then, the test of a substance's religious worth or validity is not what kind of far-out experience it can produce, but is the life improved by its use? That's the test. Now, on that score, if you remove the "religious cocoon," the experiences don't seem to have much in the way of discernible, traceable effects."
"I think you do have to attend to the sort of core values of film, which is that the audience wants to have a relationship with the characters, they want to understand what's going on there. There are certain things that comics can have a little bit more freedom in then when you're asking an audience to engage in it as a piece of cinema, but I do feel like the canvas is much bigger and wider and that we're being invited and frankly challenged to take risks, to be a little bit different. And that's fun, that's exciting."
"She began to see that character is a better possession than money, rank, intellect, or beauty, and to feel that if greatness is what a wise man has defined it to be, 'truth, reverence, and good will,' then her friend Friedrich Bhaer was not only good, but great."
"Genius is talent in which character makes itself heard."
"We all have an ongoing narrative inside our heads, the narrative that is spoken aloud if a friend asks a question. That narrative feels deeply natural to me. We also hang on to scraps of dialogue. Our memories don’t usually serve us up whole scenes complete with dialogue. So I suppose I’m saying that I like to work from what a character is likely to remember, from a more interior place."
"I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters."
"With films it's not usually that I have a particular character I'm looking for; I'll read the character and my imagination will start spinning and I'll go, "Yes, definitely." I'm thinking it would be nice to keep challenging myself."
