Quotes About Characters

Good TV is not about people being happy; it's drama.

I read all these Marvel wikis, and there are characters that just stand out to you, and you think, 'How is this character not being used? This is crazy.'

You have to create characters - certainly in series TV - who people engage with. They don't have to be nice; you don't have to agree with them. But they do have to be compulsively watchable and believable and human, and you want to know what happens to them.

It felt as if the people on Twitter had been invited to be characters in a courtroom drama, and had been allowed to choose their roles, and had all gone for the part of the hanging judge. Or it was even worse than that. They all had gone for the part of the people in the lithographs being ribald at whippings.

It felt like the people on Twitter had been invited to be characters in a courtroom drama, and had been allowed to choose their roles, and had all gone for the part of the hanging judge.

What we get, instead, are characters keeping their heartless compulsions secret from those who love them; characters scheming to appear loving or to prove to themselves that what feels like love is really just disguised self-interest; or, at most, characters directing an abstract or spiritual love toward somebody profoundly repellent . . .

Have you ever felt, in the course of reading a detective novel, a guilty thrill of relief at having a character murdered before he can step onto the page and burden you with his actual existence? Detective stories always have too many characters anyway. And characters mentioned early on but never sighted, just lingering offstage, take on an awful portentous quality. Better to have them gone.

However appalling to consider, however tedious to enact, every novel requires furniture, whether it is to be named or unnamed, for the characters will be unable to remain in standing position for the duration of the story.

Many of the characters are fools and they're always playing tricks on me and treating me badly.

Would not the characters of her many novels be the search, if not the expression, of her many selves? Add the thousands of letters sent, as if cast upon the sea in so many bottles, in the search for understanding, for love... (...)

The only way you can talk about this great tide in which you're a participant is as Schopenhauer did: the universe is a dream dreamed by a single dreamer where all the dream characters dream too.

I say sister because we were never too alike, too competitive with one another, ever to bond as friends: like the projecting pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, our characters, by reason of their similar cuts, could never really lock.

Characters are supposed to have understandable motivations. The reader is supposed to be able to relate to them.

Ammachi, when I come to the end of a book and I look up, just four days have passed. But in that time I've lived through three generations and learned more about the world and about myself than I do during a year in school. Ahab, Queequeg, Ophelia, and other characters die on the page so that we might live better lives.

I disappear for twenty minutes into Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier while John does the dishes, fighting past my initial irritation all the class nonsense and how no one will say anything of significance because it's simply not done to be explicit. Like in James or Wharton. Those novels where you're screaming at characters to go ahead already and blurt it out, save us a hundred pages of prevarication.

I'm not comfortable being around too many people. I don't like being out in public too much. I don't like going to bars. I don't like doing celebrity stuff. So most of the characters I play are people who don't always feel comfortable beyond their small circle of friends.

I love gritty drama. I'm passionate about films and drama that make you think - hard-hitting, gravelly characters.

I need to make the characters that I play in movies more accessible to audiences, more real. As an actor, you're always passive; you're not making that many choices, so when something allows you to open up a bit, you want to explore your newfound freedom.

I think that, for whatever reason, we've gotten to a place where, particularly in Hollywood, things have to be very pat. Like 'I'm a good guy. I'm a bad guy.'

We're trying to tell a very full story of 'Nashville' and these characters in Nashville, and I'm really hopeful that we're going to be able to do something as innovative as 'American Horror Story' and 'Friday Night Lights.' And I think so far, we're on the right path for that.

No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.

I'm drawn towards people who have a little pathos and a little dark side, and I feel the same towards fictional characters.

The fun thing about writing a book with multiple paths and multiple endings is you really get to explore the characters and figure out their different fates.

Cinema has the power to change the society. Through my films, the kind of characters I have played and will play, I am trying to do my bit in changing the patriarchal mindset.