Quotes About Characters

I was asked to be on 'The Colbert Report' last year as Big Bird and Oscar. But when we got there, we discovered they wanted both characters on at the same time. Stephen Colbert didn't know one man plays them both. We called Joey Mazzarino, our head writer, who's a very good puppeteer as well. He agreed to zip over and do Oscar.

I really like using genre to tell a story about characters but also use it as a Trojan horse to tell social or cultural commentary. That's where the best stuff, especially in the zombie genre, comes out of.

I think about 'The Simpsons,' which has been going on for 25 years. Homer is still in his late 30's. Lisa is 8, Bart is 10. Their stories are told. Yet the series keeps going on and on like a zombie that won't lie down and die. That feels forced and unnatural. The characters never change, grow, age.

Italian writer-director Paolo Sorrentino makes zombie movies, which probably comes as a surprise to him. At the center of his best and most recent pictures are the walking dead, characters in a race with themselves across mortality's finish line, their spirits arriving before the rest of them.

I always say that the characters in Jane Austen's original books are rather like zombies because they live in this bubble of immense wealth and privilege and no matter what's going on around them they have a singular purpose to maintain their rank and to impress others.

When you're doing a series, you're really in a zone. You're thinking about those characters and their situations in a free-floating way all the time. They live with you all the time. So it's just as natural as breathing to be having ideas and thinking about what they're thinking about.

There is a comfort zone of knowing where things are going and having characters in place, but the action gets more and more dramatic and is very challenging to describe.

In older science fiction stories, they had to rely on storytelling as opposed to spectacle. The old run of the 'Twilight Zone,' the star was the writing and the storytelling, and the characters and the twists and the cleverness in the setup and payoff and execution.

I fit well in the comedy zone. A plump and chubby figure goes well with most onscreen characters... it adds more value to what I say.

When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him.

What I like and find liberating in dialogue comedy is that the characters, and what they say, are not me. These are fleeting thoughts and observations and not presented as truths but as something that illuminates the character and the dynamic between the characters. This kind of dialogue is thesis and antithesis - and we never get to a synthesis.

One of the main reasons I write fiction is to try to understand what life is like for people other than myself, to try to see the world through my characters' eyes. I often find that I'm able to understand certain emotional truths about my own life by exploring things from different vantages.

With writing fiction, I'm either not courageous enough or just not suited for telling truths in a more conventional way. As an actor, I inhabit those characters as I'm writing them.

I love being in the archives, traveling, sitting in dusty places and looking at books with brittle pages. I love reading biographies and researching, to make myself informed about whatever political or historical time I'm writing about. From there, a lot of the emotional truths about my characters emerge.

I try to build a full personality for each of our cartoon characters - to make them personalities.

I start drawing, and eventually the characters involve themselves in a situation. Then in the end, I go back and try to cut out most of the preachments.

In the pre-production process, I am emailing with the actors or jumping on the phone, and we're sort of figuring out who the characters are and trying to build the relationship dynamic and things like that. Then, also, I am outlining.

You hear many things, take a little from each experience, and tune your imagination to create believable characters and situations.

A lot of the characters I've played before are heroic or invincible in some ways and not tuned into fear and anxiety and pain.

Definitely later on in the 'Life is Strange' season one recording, we were all pretty tuned into who these characters were. There wasn't a whole lot of finagling that needed to be done, I don't think.

There are so many characters whizzing around inside my head, it's like Looney Tunes. But as soon as I've finished writing about them, I completely forget who they are.

The fact that 'Mom' is not joke, joke, joke - and is investing in these characters and their lives, things that really happen to people - I think it's resonating, and that's why people are tuning into it and not just dismissing it as a multi-cam sitcom.

The Master of Ceremonies in 'Bridge and Tunnel' is a wonderful man, if I do say so myself. I talk about all the characters in the third person. But, he is a really congenial... just a good stand-up guy, who happens to be Pakistani-American. He's been here for years.

I prefer playing characters that are going through turmoil. Most movie characters are just in service to the story.