Quotes About Character

Peter Gould and Vince Gilligan and the slew of fantastic writers and directors have always geared me towards making a three-dimensional human.

I think writers should create characters who are human and have a character arc of their own.

I admire writers such as Elmore Leonard who can nail a character in three or four lines of dialogue, so he doesn't need pages of back story or clumsy exposition.

In sheer genius Pascal ranks among the very greatest writers who have lived upon this earth. And his genius was not simply artistic; it displayed itself no less in his character and in the quality of his thought.

There are dialogue writers for a movie, there is a script to be followed... whatever my character says is not a reflection on my personal opinion or principles in life.

I've met many, many writers who say they would never write about their family, never write about people they did not totally make up. But that is not the composition of my character.

When writers don't know what to do with a character, they build up the supporting cast and universe to kind of hide that fact. After a while, you can no longer see the character for the underbrush. When that happens, you need to bring out the weed-whacker to clear some of that away so you can focus on the main character.

You can't really claim too much ownership of your character. They really do belong to the writers, and in many ways, you're just their puppet.

I believe that stories find writers, writers don't find stories. With the 'Pendragon' series, I actually had multiple story ideas and decided that instead of writing them individually, I would create a character whose journey would thread them all together.

You wanna do a lot of backstory for your character - as an actor, you wanna research that. But on the show, it's fun to remain in that naive place as you go along, and be able to continue to discover things about your character as the writers come up with them.

There's this thing in TV that I find hysterical where the writers and creators will ask us if you want to know what happens to your character or if you want to experience it episode by episode. In the theatre, we always know the ending; we always know where the character is going.

All the great writers root their characters in true human behaviour.

And I have the support of the writers: I have a great relationship with the creative team, and they have a good hold of my character and my personality, and they come up with some great stuff, and I'm forever trying to change it up, keep it fresh.

I kind of thought the writers were starting to take Taylor and make her kind of down and dirty.

I always say, if a guy writes the same lead female character type over and over, we are not seeing their writing chops so much as their dating website wishlist.

The advantage of being the creator of the character is I know them better than anybody, I like to think. But the reality one has to deal with in a serial collaborative medium like comics is that you're not the only one who writes the character.

I learn the lines that JK Rowling or whoever writes them, and say them.

I'm not one of those people who writes a biography or tries to figure out what kind of ice cream the character liked when he was 10.

Whether I'm writing the script, or someone else writes the initial draft, I'm always an actor's director first. I always try to listen to them a lot and try to put their voices into their character.

You just play what a writer writes, in terms of what a character chooses to do and how a character chooses to deal with their various relationships.

We do not need to proselytise either by our speech or by our writing. We can only do so really with our lives. Let our lives be open books for all to study.

I'm more comfortable writing traditional protagonists. But 'Steve Jobs' and 'The Social Network' have antiheroes. I like to write antiheroes as if they're making their case to God about why they should be allowed into heaven. I have to find something in that character that is like me and write to that.

The best adaptations are the ones that really excavate the material. The movies that work are the ones in which somebody very smart figured out how to take all the thematic material, all the character material, all the filigree, all the beautiful writing and put it into a story.

You don't just decide to destroy a person by making up stuff, and no one at 'SNL' is writing to go after someone.