Quotes About Characters

I do try to look at scripts and keep an eye out for challenging roles.

I came up through Second City, so I'm used to playing 20 characters every night who are very different from each other. I wouldn't want my career to be any different.

When I sit down to write, I know everything I need to know... I start writing, and within 30 seconds or 60 seconds, I'm watching a movie. I'm not making this stuff up; the characters are acting it out,and I'm just writing it down.

One time, I had to do Edgar in 'King Lear' and Owl in 'Winnie the Pooh' on the same day.

Freddie Kruger, Jason, Michael Myers - they're all our generation. I think the kids wanted some new guys that they could take ownership of and Jigsaw was that guy.

What I love about 'The Office' is the fast pace and the zaniness of those characters.

The essence of the show is that SpongeBob is an innocent in a world of jaded characters. The rest is absurd packaging.

I build my characters from the day they're born to the first page of the script.

For the past few years my fans have made it very clear that they would like to read my novels and revisit my family of characters faster than I can write them. For them, I am willing to make a change to my working methods so the stories in my head can reach the page more frequently.

I find interesting characters or lessons that resonate with people and sometimes I write about them in the sports pages, sometimes I write them in a column, sometimes in a novel, sometimes a play or sometimes in nonfiction. But at the core I always say to myself, 'Is there a story here? Is this something people want to read?'

My books, I will say one thing - they all have a driving narrative, and you have to turn the pages, and the way you do that is to create characters that you really love and care about and put them in a fairly dire situation.

And when I'm writing, I write a lot anyway. I might write pages and pages of conversation between characters that don't necessarily end up in the book, or in the story I'm working on, because they're simply my way of getting to know the characters.

I want my characters to really overuse their coping mechanisms to the point where they break down within 300 pages.

When I was asked to compose a score for... 'Palo Alto,' I first thought to myself, 'What is the house that these characters would want to live in?' I wanted to paint a picture and color scheme that I could work around. I gently apply different daubs to see what fits to match the color I have in mind with these characters.

I have always loved contemporary dance, but it has always been a bit of a mystery to me. But choreography is very much like what I do when you are putting characters in frame on the page. It's so impressive what they do with their bodies. It's like painting: an abstraction.

I get creeped out by Francis Bacon's paintings, and I can't say exactly why. They're all really disturbing, and there is an almost nimbus-like quality behind some of his frightening characters and stuff.

When you have an ensemble where characters pair off so easily, it becomes extremely isolating in the story world. You can end up with two actors who have not seen each other face to face all season long.

When you're actually inside the experience of writing something, in some ways, you're just writing. Ultimately, you fall in love with the characters, and you get excited about the story, and you're sitting there in your sweatpants or pajamas, and you do get a little lost in it.

I grew up really into comic books, and I actually thought I was going to be a comic-book artist. That was my ambition before I realized I couldn't keep characters looking the same from panel to panel.

I don't think there is really much from my career that I want to go back to. I think that, with most of the characters that I've been lucky enough to work with, I've said all I have to say about the Black Panther, Green Lantern, and on and on.

Characters are not created on paper or laptop alone.

I'm always looking for complicated characters in fiction about whom I can feel a dozen feelings at once - in the space of a single paragraph, even.

I always have a rough outline, but I'm shocked at how little I actually follow it. Those characters keep doing things that I never expected. I think if I crept up to my keyboard and peeked, they'd be talking about things behind my back. Okay, that's a little paranoid and delusional... but just a little.

There's no shortage of orphans in 19th-century literature, but it's hard to find a single happy, communicative, functional parental relationship in the whole of 'Great Expectations,' even among the minor characters.