Quotes About Characterization

I really just like characters who you don't know where they stand for a long while. It's like people. You hang out with them for 10 years, and then all of a sudden they do something, and you say, 'Who are you?' That's more interesting. In life and on-screen.

We like to put people on a pedestal, give them one character trait, and if they step outside of that shrinelike area that we blocked out for them, then we will punish them.

I feel like a lot of girl characters in anything usually end up being either extremely tough or extremely ditzy. There's always some sort of extreme personality trait that they have. I like to try writing girls that feel like normal people, like normal women that you'd meet in real life.

Many of the traits in my characters are exaggerations of things I see in myself. But in 'How Should a Person Be?' I wasn't trying to write about myself so much as a combination of myself and these women I was seeing in our culture.

In 'A Boy's Own Story' and 'Jack Holmes and His Friend,' my idea was to take someone totally different from my real self and, at the same time, to assign to him my own life trajectory.

I examine other people's characteristics, so when I'm playing characters, I don't always have to make them me; I can transform into others.

We can bring to characters dark and bright sides that nobody even dreams about.

She is a character in a novel who reads the other characters as characters and rewrites them as people.

fundamental difference in approach can make the short stories of Stella Gibbons seem somewhat obvious in their tone. And yet this is misleading: these stories are not obvious at all; they simply adhere to a storytelling convention that has been lost sight of in our quest for greater depth of characterization and psychological insight.

Opparizio is a perfect target: rich, arrogant and Republican.

All the important drawings I do myself. Every single character is also done by me.

I don't like to analyze what I do too much, but I certainly never meet a single person and say, 'You're the next character.' People think that's what I do. They also think that I sit down and observe and try to imitate random people. I've never done that at all.

I do a lot better if I sit around and think about a character for a couple of months.

So many of my characters have really crazy physicalities, so it's really fun to be able to say, like, 'I'm an elf who's the size of a dollar bill!'

For every book that I write... I develop a history for each person and make sure they are well rounded and flawed. You have to know everything about them from their shoe size, to where they went to school, to what their first pet was, to what they like to eat, to what they want out of life.

Most of the time when I receive a script, it says something like 'Rosenberg is the fat, slovenly Mayor, who doesn't want the kids to use the Skateboard Park', or 'Stein is a pompous, rotund attorney, imposing to all.' It would be so freeing to get a script where my character is simply described as 'A Man.'

Before I ever begin writing a new story, I have to sketch my characters out on paper. It's part of my process of understanding who they are.

Well, I don't know. It's long, it's longer than both of the other books put together, so it's more ambitious. I think I get under the skin of the people a lot more than in the other books.

I love the process of creating a character; someone entirely different from myself, and depicting it, either on stage or screen.

I really love being a character actor.

You're fair. Dirty blond and fair-complected.

I have been called many things, never savior.

My theory of characterization is basically this: Put some dirt on a hero, and put some sunshine on the villain, one brush stroke of beauty on the villain.

The best I can say was that it was a very horsely horse. It was, indeed, the horseliest of all horses