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 played this character twice in live action, and now I've become an animated character. It was actually fun to see myself drawn - I've never been a drawn character before."
"We need more female directors, we also need men to step up and identify with female characters and stories about women. We don't want to create a ghetto where women have to do movies about women. To assume stories about women need to be told by a woman isn't necessarily true, just as stories about men don't need a male director."
"You're being cast for your acting ability. It's not based on the way your body functions. If you're playing a lead in a movie, it's for that character and they'll tailor it to you. In a dance company, you have to fit in a definite mold."
"Perfection of character is this: to live each day as if it were your last, without frenzy, without apathy, without pretence."
"Such as are thy habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of thy mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts."
"A man's own manner and character is what most becomes him."
"In men of the highest character and noblest genius there is to be found an insatiable desire for honor, command, power, and glory."
"Our character is not so much the product of race and heredity as of those circumstances by which nature forms our habits, by which we are nurtured and live."
"As an actor, you're supposed to be able to form yourself into different characters and different roles. It's a transformation, and it is awesome."
"A problem that I have with everything fictional is that writers are always having to come up with sudden artillery explosions in the middle of whatever is going on. The characters are having interesting, subtle interactions, or jealousies, or whatever it is, and suddenly some gigantic angry eruption has to happen, a giant gasp where everyone has to scramble around. That's the point where I'm turned off. I want the dynamic range to be a little smaller. I don't like the big false bangs."
"You want to play another kind of character in another genre, and it's been something I've been trying to do if I can in the career so far, and it's something I hope to continue because it's interesting to me and you get to do different things as an actor."
"Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary."
"If you know anything about James Whitcomb Riley, you know that Little Orphan Annie is one of the most fantastic characters who ever lived in America before Charlie Chaplin."
"If you don't have obsessions, don't write. my characters are obsessed."
"Everything you could want - action, suspense, character and setting, all floating on the easy lyricism of a fine writer at the top of his game."
"The vilest abortionist is he who attempts to mould a child's character."
"An interesting play cannot in the nature of things mean anything but a play in which problems of conduct and character of personalimportance to the audience are raised and suggestively discussed."
"Have you ever met a man of good character where women are concerned?"
"For character too is a process and an unfolding. . . among our valued friends is there not someone or other who is a little too self confident and disdainful. . . ."
"'Character," says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms - character is destiny'."
