Quotes About Characterization

I am in the representational business, a portraitist. I have tried to walk an amused line amid hyperbole, documentary detail, cruel characterisation, occasional affection, some good punchlines and anthropological social insight. It's been a good living.

Another of my pet peeves is that the female characters used to be all sort of cutesy, like having flour on their nose after they baked cookies and not knowing it. And now they're all a mess, like waking up really hungover and getting fired. I want to create characters who aren't flawless but also aren't ridiculous or incompetent at life.

He studied Sam across the bar. Funny how some people ran so true to type. If you cast Sam as a bartender in a play, the knowing critic would say, "Come now, that's going too far, being too obvious, why don't you use a little imagination?" Sam was so Irish-looking that he looked like a cartoon. Only thing wrong about him was his name. He ought to have been called Mike, or Paddy. Hey, who wasn't using imagination now?

I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the make-up made me feel the person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked onto the stage he was fully born.

Parsimonious by nature, the "aged spinster" (as the newspapers would soon be describing her)

As a reader I like both great characterization and fast moving plots. The challenge is to balance the both and not compromise one for the other.

But Mrs. John Dashwood was a strong caricature of himself;—more narrow-minded and selfish.

Singing in character you can be more of a show off or more modest because it isn't yourself it's a nice way to sing, unusual, a bit like being in musical I guess.

In 'Me Before You,' the two characters popped into my head fully formed, which is really strange and unusual. Other books, I sit on them for two or three months. I have a whole routine: I buy a nice book; I hand-write all their characteristics. I put them through little tests just to see how they would react to things.

It's very unusual to be playing something other than human.

So often in English fiction, people are either upper-class twits, or else they're knockabouts, less than human.

Being a writer means you get to live vicariously through your characters

The second draft is on yellow paper, that's when I work on characterizations. The third is pink, I work on story motivations. Then blue, that's where I cut, cut, cut.

Every quirky girl doesn't have to be the best-friend character. It's a very limiting and self-fulfilling prophecy. People only write things that will get green-lit, so they write to those stereotypes.

On a daily basis, you're working with Steve Carell; you're not working with Ricky Gervais. You try a line, and you can't be writing for David Brent. You have to be writing for Michael Scott because Steve is Michael Scott.

I always want to abandon myself to my characters, and I never knew if I was actually abandoning myself to Lady Macbeth. I was scared to enter the darkness. Almost every day, I would go back home and be like, 'Oh my God, what am I doing?' I had no idea.

In one book, CACHALOT, just for my own amusement, every character is based directly on someone I have known.

One of the things that all authors of fiction must learn to judge is whether - and in what detail - to describe the face of a character.

The nicest characters in 'A Week in December' are, in fact, Muslims - and their religious devotion is one of the things that defines them.

One of the things that we've tried to do with the 'Guardians' films is to allow the women to be full characters.

Nobody wants to play a one-dimensional character.

I'm used to one-dimensional female friendships. It's become a kind of trope.

It's Cash and Jewel and Varadaman and Dewey Del', pa says kind of hangdog and proud too, with this teeth and all, even if he wouldn't look at us. 'Meet Mrs Bundren', he says.

Even Karenin, who might well have turned out to be a flat caricature with his stick-out ears and cracking knuckles, is endowed with a complex personality as the other characters see him differently on different occasions: when Anna sees him at the Petersburg station, when he is at his government desk, when his son recoils from his embrace, when he is at the interview with his divorce lawyer, when