Quotes About Characters

Donna Tartt blows me away - that impeccable writing, so rich you could eat it and so luminous that it lights up the whole room, and the way she brings her characters to life so completely and in such fine detail that you know them as intimately as your dearest friends.

I like any film where the female characters are complex and have a functioning imperfection.

You find a story - or more importantly, you find some characters - that you want to be around as a filmmaker. The style and how we're going to shoot it and how we're going to design it and how it's all going to feel and look depends on that story. They tell me how I should shoot it.

I always thought that life is full of stories and characters that feel like literary stories and characters. So when I started making documentaries, they weren't humble empirical things, just following people around. I was always trying to impose a story.

I'm fortunate to be famous for two rather imposing characters like Magneto and Gandalf.

As an actor, I've been all over the map, but since I've moved to Hollywood, people tend to cast me in these more imposing characters, which is actually really fun for me. I've always been way more attracted to playing that than the hero.

I feel Bengali directors have offered me characters which have a story to tell and not just impress people because of what I wear in the film. That's the kind of roles I want to do.

I like when you are telling a story and fall into an impression.

It's not like I go around trying to imprint all the characters I play with Q.

I think you leave your imprint on every screenplay. I like to bring my experience as a woman to all my female characters that hopefully makes them a little more layered and complex.

You can do a lot of impromptu in dubbing. You can bring in different characters and different accents.

As a writer, I use improv to write. Exploring characters and stories through improv and sitting at the computer and thinking about what this character would say or do helps me creatively.

My impulse is to create an aesthetic that's about a humanistic approach to a world and trying to create compassion for all the characters.

I've been fortunate, I guess: I've gotten to play a lot of very diverse roles for quite a long time. But in the beginning, I was thinking, 'I'm not gonna do certain characters. I will be willing to say no and live on a couch.' And I was really happy.

Characters are so important to a story that they actually decide where the story is going. When I write, I know my characters. I know how things are going to end, and I know some important incidents along the way.

I've been in the industry for 15 years, and I knew all the pieces that needed to be included to make a series. It wasn't just about writing characters, it wasn't just about writing a funny joke.

He's a man who... well, one of the great things about Shakespeare is that his characters are inconsistent, and that's something I think makes him a writer above most writers because inconsistency is what we, as people, are full of. We maybe don't see it in ourselves too often, but we are inconsistent.

Actors incorporate certain emotions from our own lives in order to create characters, and emotions come from experience.

As a writer, I have this compulsion to take characters who appear formidable and bombard them with adversity until they crumble. What's interesting is watching them rise again, and seeing how they've changed and grown, if indeed they have.

Sometimes the characters I find the most compelling are in independent movies. With independent scripts people can take more challenges.

A lot of independent films try to pull off a 14-day shooting schedule, which I think is ridiculous. No matter how big or small you are, it really kills whatever sort of time you get to allow the actors to find their characters, and to spend time to think about what they're doing.

Being of Indian heritage is a challenge - and it's a blessing as well sometimes - because being good isn't good enough. You have to be exceptional to play different characters.

That's what interested me: their characters. I wanted to know what they had acquired from the world around them and how their formative experiences found expression in a dimly lighted basement in Glen Ridge. What was it in their upbringing as children and adolescents, so seemingly comfortable and secure, that inclined them to take pleasure in the conscious degradation of a helpless woman?

By the way, the best place to find names for fictional characters, if you are ever foolish enough to write a novel, is in a Bradshaw or an ABC. All the nicest people always sound like railway stations.