Character Quotes
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Onstage, there's a separation between character and audience; onscreen, you can go to a deeper place.
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When you write for a show that's not yours, your job is to hear the voices of the characters and write as best you can for those voices.
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If there's nothing interesting about a character, people leave because there's no desire to see what happens.
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I'll instinctively know that I identify with a character.
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In the beginning, I would find a character I understood. That was my focus. Not now - but you basically get offered the exact same thing you just did. Which I find hilarious. I did 'The Vow,' and then I had every love story you can imagine thrown at me. And now I'm getting offers for comedies.
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When I work with a character like Valjean on stage, I get totally absorbed in that man. I become that man. But there's always, outside of that, the third eye, which watches what you're doing. And you can say to yourself, 'I'm crying well' or 'I'm being angry well.' But there's always that element there, and it never stops.
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I started improvising the Cliff character, based on someone I grew up with.
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I'm a flawed character... I viewed this situation as one big lie that I repeated a lot of times.
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When my marriage broke up... I had just put on 45 pounds for my 'Shall We Dance?' character. I had to eat 10,000 calories a day just to put on weight while training with Tony Dovolani. I basically stayed in bed for a six-month rotation of depression naps. Dance helped me lose the weight.
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People of good character are not all going to come down on the same side of difficult political and social issues. Good people - people of character and moral literacy - can be conservative, and good people can be liberal. We must not permit our disputes over thorny political questions to obscure the obligation we have to offer instruction to all our young people in the area in which we have, as a society, reached a consensus: namely, on the importance of good character, and some of its pervasive particulars.
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I don't see one as bring better or more literate than the other and there's a real buzz to not only writing about a character I love like Superman, but also writing something that kids can enjoy.
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Every man should be considered as having a right to the character which he deserves; that is, to be spoken of according to his actions.
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I don't write a whole lot about one person that exists in reality; it's usually characteristics of different people that I combine into a character. I tend to think through and try and make characters behave in a natural way. I follow the character and think about what they would do, what decisions they would make.
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I'm probably more character-driven than plot-driven. It's rare for me to attach myself to an idea for a story.
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Superman has evolved continually in the comic books over the course of 75 years. He couldn't even fly for years in the original comic books. Kryptonite wasn't added until the '60s. All sorts of things like this. If a character is going to remain vital, he does have to change with the times.
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When you hear 'experience,' that's all about resume. And Obama didn't have the resume. But we knew, long before that, 'steady in a crisis' was much more important than 'experience.' When you watched the presidential campaign, you saw that Obama was the one who happened to be steady... He demonstrated aspects of his character people were hungry for.
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This Romeo character is something I decided to create, like my alter ego. So the name Romeo was invented from the original Romeo and Juliet. I wanted to show people I'm like a modern Romeo.
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The trick to being a good actor is getting so involved in your character that the camera disappears, the 50 bored guys eating doughnuts disappear, friends disappear. To get to that point when you don't have to think about it, you're just acting and reacting in those circumstances.
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I was always trying, even in pure action movies, to find what was sensitive about the character more than the pure action.
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A novel can be set in motion by an incident, a character, a location, a mood - by anything at all. Sometimes the stimulus can be an idea, which will rapidly clothe itself in character and incident. 'Foreign Bodies' came about through the contemplation of the contrast between post-second world war America and Europe.
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In the time between when you first read a script and are offered the role and the time when you begin to shoot, I really love putting in the time and work on that and getting a solid backstory to a character and researching all that I can about what that person does for a vocation or their upbringing or where they're from.
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Faith is deliberate confidence in the character of God whose ways you cannot understand at the time.
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Everyone has, inside himself ... what shall I call it? A piece of good news! Everyone is ... a very great, very important character.
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I was a supporting character in other people's lives, which seemed right and familiar to me. I was also an outsider: English in the U.S., American in England, dogged yet comforted by that familiar feeling of alien-ness, which occupied that space where my sense of self should have been.
