Quotes About Characterization

Girls in scripts are often pretty but brainless, or geeky and no one likes them, so it's great to find richer roles. Chalk and cheese aspects of people are very interesting to play.

My sensibility is such that I automatically get drawn to films that have a good story, good characterization.

Strong, smart, self-reliant women who don't need men to define them only crop up in the human myth-base in one guise - the Wicked Witch.

There's a bizarre insistence on how a story should be. 'The protagonist must be sympathetic!' they say. Whatever that means. I never engage in that discussion. I never use that word, 'sympathetic.' I just know 'interesting.'

There is a very thin line dividing characterisation from impersonation. I've to make sure I don't cross over into mimicry.

People have this preconceived notion of me. I'm 'Gob' to them: this thoughtless sociopath who lives this bizarre, ego-driven life. That would be insanity.

Just as serious modern literature does not have plain old bad guys, sophisticated movies may also avoid such stock figures.

I really do literally put myself into a character's shoes.

With the introduction of Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler, Miss Mitchell managed to create the two most famous lovers in the English-speaking world since Romeo and Juliet. Scarlett springs alive in the first sentence of the book and holds the narrative center for over a thousand pages. She is a fabulous, pixilated, one-of-a-kind creation, and she does not utter a dull line in the entire book.

In reality, there are very few villains who view themselves as villains. They just have a certain agenda at a certain time.

Let your characters talk to each other and do things. Spend time with them - they'll tell you who they are and what they're up to.

You want to avoid at all costs drawing your characters on those that already exist in other works of fiction. You must learn about people from people, not from what you read. Your reading should confirm what you've observed in the world.

I'm drawn to villains that are three-dimensional and raw and that I can kind of see in my own life.

You build a character, a shell, and if you build it right, something comes to live inside it.

There are relatively few science fiction or fantasy books with the main character being an old person.

So I decided to move that scene in the doctor's office to two-thirds into the movie, after the viewers had come to know Ryan and Ali and share in their happiness.

Rarely do I try to pull a creature out of life and make it a character.

When the drama attains a characterization which makes the play a revelation of human conduct and a dialogue which characterizes yet pleases for itself, we reach dramatic literature.

My job is to allow the character to live and breathe - and become as real to the reader as he or she is to me.

There should really not be anything gratuitous in a work of art. Sometimes what seems as if it's gratuitous may be a passage in which a character is being characterized so that the reader comes to know him or her better.

I believe that if the story is fleshed out and the characters more believable, the reader is more likely to take the journey with them. In addition, the plot can be more complex. My characters are very real to me, and I want each of my characters to be different.

I wanted to give readers the feeling of knowing the characters, a mental image.

I never base characters on real people. There are people who do that but I really don't know how to do it.

I always talk about my characters like they're real people.