Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The less you offer, the more readers are forced to bring the world to life with their own visual imaginings. I personally hate an illustration of a character on a jacket of a book. I never want to have someone show me what the character really looks like - or what some artist has decided the character really looks like - because it always looks wrong to me. I realize that I prefer to kind of meet the text halfway and offer a lot of visual collaborations from my own imaginative response to the sentences.
It takes about a year to write an opera for me, but not a really a year of writing. I'm touring at the same time, and I'm playing, sometimes doing smaller projects.[The opera] Akhnaten fits in with Gandhi and Einstein, so that forms a trilogy in a way.I picked people who were these kind of larger than life characters, who kind of changed the world they lived in by almost the force of their personality and their inventiveness. People that I think not only do I admire but I think they're admirable people.
I would make a huge distinction between theater improvisation and film improvisation. There isn't much improvisation in film - there's virtually none. The people that theoretically could be good at this in a theater situation don't necessarily do this in a film in a way that will work, because it's much broader on a stage. But in a movie, it has to be real, and the characters have to look entirely real because it's being done as a faux documentary, so there are even fewer actors that can do that on film.
The acting challenge is every day it was just for me a challenge obviously because of the volume that I - of work I had to do throughout the series. Every day was just trying to keep it fresh, trying to keep it maintain a consistency and a growth in the character and in myself. That was the main focus was staying focused when you're fatigued after, you know, it's mainly to work but it's ultimately very rewarding working with this production and the actors and the crew. The crew gave a lot for this thing.
Just the fact that there's motion and sound, took me a long time on Walking Dead to get used to the fact that in television, characters don't have to say things. In comics, people have to say I feel this way, or I want to do this, and you can do so much with gesture and movement and facial expressions that you can do sometimes facial expression stuff in comics, but you can do so more if somebody can move around without actually speaking. That leads to a different style of writing between the two mediums.
People talking about politics usually start from the ass end backwards in that they think you have a political agenda, and then you make your work fit that cookie cutter. It's the other way around. One works by simple observation, looking into things. It's usually called insight and out of that comes your view - not that you have the view first and then squash everything to make it fit. I'm not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view.
I love sitcoms, and I grew up on sitcoms. That's my tasty junk food. So I wanted to create a sitcom and have some really quirky characters, because most of the stuff they make now is just so marginalized. How interesting is a white guy who's 28 years old and lives in New York? What story have we not seen about a character like that? Just as a writer, it's so much easier to come up with comedy when you have a really oppressed Indian boy. Or a mother who is an addict but still has to take care of her kids.
The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way. If it never surprises it is flat. Flat characters ... in their purest form ... are constructed round a single idea or quality; when there is more than one factor to them, we get the beginning of the curve toward the round. The really flat character can be experessed in one sentence such as, "I will never desert Mr Micawber." There is Mrs Micawber - she says she won't desert Mr Micawber; she doesn't, and there she is.
Being branded to some subset of your fans is important when it comes to creating films and characters they're not familiar with. It's enormously difficult to market to a global audience, and it's becoming more difficult. A brand matters to parents, whereas kids are largely driven by their urgent reaction to the product. In the future, where there are going to be choices that have to be made by parents because it will be prohibitively expensive to access everything, those will be driven partially by brand.
I make no conscious effort to be tough, or hard-boiled, or grim, or any of the things I am usually called. I merely try to write as the character would write, and I never forget that the average man, from the fields, the streets, the bars, the offices and even the gutters of his country, has acquired a vividness of speech that goes beyond anything I could invent, and that if I stick to this heritage, this logos of the American countryside, I shall attain a maximum of effectiveness with very little effort.
Theresa Rebeck's writing is so scarily funny. I just love how unapologetic she is with her writing: she doesn't try to make her characters likeable or heroic, she just really makes them human. Hopefully, the audience is able to love them in the end - or have whatever feelings that they want to have about all of them - but I love that she doesn't have that agenda. That is something that, as an actress, was really appealing to me; to just get to be in this group of people who are complicated and very human.
Some TV shows are like really good novels in that there are enough episodes that you start to have your own feelings about how the characters should act. When the scriptwriters go slightly wrong, when they make the character make a left turn that he or she wouldn't do, you know enough about the characters to say, "No, that's not what she would do there. That's wrong." You can actually argue with a TV show in a way that you can't do as much with movie - you inhabit a TV show in the way you inhabit a novel.
Instead of recognizing the State as ‘the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men,’ the run of mankind, with rare exceptions, regards it not only as a final and indispensable entity, but also as, in the main, beneficent. The mass-man, ignorant of its history, regards its character and intentions as social rather than anti-social; and in that faith he is willing to put at its disposal an indefinite credit of knavery, mendacity and chicane, upon which its administrators may draw at will.
When we make films - even 2D films - you're always trying to create this illusion of 3D, anyway. You're trying to create a believable world with characters walking, in and out of the perspective, to create the illusion that there's a world. The desire and drive to create this illusion of three-dimensional space is something that is true about every kind of film because you want the audience to really be experiencing it, first hand. It's a natural extension of the storytelling and the process of filmmaking.
If you're a certain type of actor, then eventually stepping into a director's shoes is a natural transition. I've always been the actor who's very focused on the narrative, where my character is in the story, and how I can benefit the story. I've always had a technical aspect of what the lens is, how the camera is going to move, how I can feed the information the director applies within that move. If you're that type of actor, narrative-based, technically proficient, the next step is actually not that far.
I've always believed that the great strength of the Internet is that it allows us to communicate with each other, it allows debate. And I think that gay marriage is a huge step forward. But debate is throwing ideas about, and when it becomes sort of a weapon of character assassination, I think that's crazy. I think the situation in America is different from in England, where we have civil partnership, and now the vote on gay marriage has been carried, and whether it will go through Parliament I don't know.
I think that a true economics thinker or a Marxist thinker would make nonsense of my argument, although I have given massive seminars and no one has demolished it so far. I did think that this idea from an artisanal and trading perception of the auratic quality of goods when they are given character and inscription, made the stories of phantasmic wealth read more powerfully in the 18th and 19th centuries than the stories of Cinderella's wealth, because they are conjured out of nothing by these magic means.
Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart - one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?
The average personality reshapes frequently, every few years even our bodies undergo a complete overhaul - desirable or not, it is a natural thing that we should change. All right, here were two people who never would change. That is what Mildred Grossman had in common with Holly Golightly. They would never change because they'd been given their character too soon; which, like sudden riches, leads to a lack of proportion: the one had splurged herself into a top-heavy realist, the other a lopsided romantic.
No, the secret is that there's no reward and we have to endure our characters and our natures as best we can, because no amount of experience or insight is going to rectify our deficiencies, our self-regard, or our cupidity. We have to learn that our desires do not find any real echo in the world. We have to accept that the people we love do not love us, or not in the way we hope. We have to accept betrayal and disloyalty, and, hardest of all, that someone is finer than we are in character or intelligence.
Symbols are specific acts or figures, while myths develop and elaborate these symbols into a story which contains characters and several episodes. The myth is thus more inclusive. But both symbol and myth have the same function psychologically; they are man's way of expressing the quintessence of his experience - his way of seeing his life, his self-image and his relations to the world of his fellow men and of nature - in a total figure which at the same moment carries the vital meaning of this experience.
Everything I make is with intention. I'm not very haphazard with my artist work, although I wish I was sometimes. I'm very conscious of the conversations I'm pushing about different threads and themes around landscape and characters that exist - how it's pictured, who's pictured it, who's owned it and who's been able to inhabit certain spaces. I have other interests as well. I'm really obsessed now with going to gay male dance clubs. I find those thrilling. I'm interested in what future characters can come.
L'homme est ne pour la socie te ; se parez-le, isolez-le, ses ide es se de suniront, son caracte' re se tournera, mille affections ridicules s'e le' veront dans son coeur; des 274 pense es extravagantes germeront dans son esprit, comme les ronces dans une terre sauvage. Man is born to live in society: separate him, isolate him, and his ideas disintegrate, his character changes, a thousand ridiculous affectations rise up in his heart; extreme thoughts take hold in his mind, like the brambles in a wild field.
No test... no testimony. You can not make lemonade with sugar alone... you must have some sour lemons. You can not learn good horsemanship by riding a tame horse. The harder the battle, the sweeter the victory. Regardless of what happens to you, never say you are having a bad day... say you are having a character building day. All the things that you are going through are building your character. You are being shaped and designed for your greatness. You have something special! You have GREATNESS within you!
America, we weaken our ties when we allow our political dialogue to become so corrosive that people of good character aren't even willing to enter into public service; so coarse with rancor that Americans with whom we disagree are seen not just as misguided but as malevolent. We weaken those ties when we define some of us as more American than others, when we write off the whole system as inevitably corrupt, and when we sit back and blame the leaders we elect without examining our own role in electing them.
In the search for character and commitment, we must rid ourselves of our inherited, even cherished biases and prejudices. Character, ability and intelligence are not concentrated in one sex over the other, nor in persons with certain accents or in certain races or in persons holding degrees from some universities over others. When we indulge ourselves in such irrational prejudices, we damage ourselves most of all and ultimately assure ourselves of failure in competition with those more open and less biased.
You must learn to look at people who are angry with you straight in the eye without getting angry back. When children see their parents treating them this way, they then recognize the parents' authority. It speaks louder than words. Their new respect for the parents is as good for them as it is for the parents. It never works to demand respect of children. It must be given willingly as a result of strength of good character in the parents, which is manifested by their non-reaction to stress in the children.
We must raise the salaries of our operators or they will all be taken from us, that is, all that are good for anything. You will recollect that, at the first meeting of the Board of Directors, I took the ground that 'it was our policy to make the office of operator desirable, to pay operators well and make their situation so agreeable that intelligent men and men of character will seek the place and dread to lose it.' I still think so, and, depend upon it, it is the soundest economy to act on this principle.
People say that you want to be varied in your career, and I've done so many things and am very appreciative. But, the one thing I've never done and wanted to do was to be a regular on a TV show, where you get 22 weeks of the year to develop and play a character. I've done arcs of five or eight episodes on shows, but I'd like to have a character that's rich enough and deep enough to want to explore and live with for a few years. Playing the same character, but doing different scenes seems very exciting to me.
At whatever time highly skilled physicians shall have developed the healing of illnesses by means of foods, and shall make provision for simple foods, and shall prohibit humankind from living as slaves to their lustful appetites, it is certain that the incidence of chronic and diversified illnesses will abate, and the general health of all mankind will be much improved. This is destined to come about. In the same way, in the character, the conduct and the manners of men, universal modifications will be made.
Orson Welles was a force of nature, who just came in and wiped the slate clean. And Citizen Kane is the greatest risk-taking of all time in film. I don’t think anything had even seen anything quite like it. The photography was also unlike anything we’d seen. The odd coldness of the filmmaker towards the character reflects his own egomania and power, and yet a powerful empathy for all of them--it’s very interesting. It still holds up, and it’s still shocking. It takes storytelling and throws it up in the air.
The role I played [in theatre] was originated by Ian McKellen in 1979 and he came. I didn't know he was there and I walked out at the end of the play, which is a very intense play - my character is required to do some really horrible things - and the director was waiting backstage and he goes, "Obviously I didn't want to tell you guys, but Ian was here today" and we, of course, freaked out.Ian McKellen said some really beautiful, kind things, one of which was, "It's so much harder to watch than it is to do."
I saved letters from my boss. There are things in there that are directly transcribed. I was so glad I did that. Sometimes when I was writing the book I wondered if some little writer hobbit part of my brain was back there puppeteering that action. But it really never, on any conscious level, occurred to me that I would write about it. I will say, I thought probably some day there would be an ancillary character in some novel - not in the one I was currently writing - that would be a dominatrix or something.
It's often frustrating when you're a war reporter and you're covering these places that far away. You're frustrated by making stories that people can't connect to in any way. It's hard for Americans to connect to Arabic-speaking Iraqis in refugee camps or Pashto-speaking Afghans in the countryside, and having a character who is a vehicle through which you're allowed to make these relationships really allowed us to gain in an emotional weight that was difficult for us to do any other way to make it all human.
If I tell you my character has grey hair, you will not see her. If I tell you she has a tiny scar at the upper left corner of her lip from which protrudes one grey whisker—you will make up the rest of her face with absolute clarity. If I tell you my character is waiting in a car, you won’t be ‘caught,’ but if I tell you he pushes his fingers down in the crack of the car seat where the ancient leather has pulled away from the seat frame, and pulls up a small coin purse with a faded note in it—you will be mine.
I think that comes with a collaboration with the writers. I think that we get cast in edgier roles because we are a little more offbeat, so people - as we get to know the writers, and as the writers get to know us, they start to write around us more, and that's why I think the pilot is not always the best way to get to experience a new television show, because we're fitting ourselves into these characters. Whereas as the show evolves, they're writing the characters for us and for our strengths and weaknesses.
In this country, unfortunately, as all over the world, we care so little, we have no deep feeling about anything. Most of us are intellectual-intellectuals in the superficial sense of being very clever, full of words and theories about what is right and what is wrong, about how we should think, what we should do. Mentally we are highly developed, but inwardly there is very little substance or significance; and it is this inward substance that brings about true action, which is not action according to an idea.
Sir," returned Mrs. Sparsit, " I cannot say that i have heard him precisely snore, and therefore must not make that statement. But on winter evenings, when he has fallen asleep at his table, I have heard him, what I should prefer to describe as partially choke. I have heard him on such occasions produce sounds of a nature similar to what may be heard in dutch clocks. Not," said Mrs. Sparsit, with a lofty sense of giving strict evidence, " That I would convey any imputation on his moral character. Far from it.
Philosophy is a necessary activity because we, all of us, take a great number of things for granted, and many of these assumptions are of a philosophical character; we act on them in private life, in politics, in our work, and in every other sphere of our lives -- but while some of these assumptions are no doubt true, it is likely, that more are false and some are harmful. So the critical examination of our presuppositions -- which is a philosophical activity -- is morally as well as intellectually important.
When I was a TV director working on Judd Apatow's show Undeclared. I was surrounded by so many young people. People like Seth Rogen, who was 9 years old or something. It was just a ridiculous amount of talented young people. I started to think I'd like to see a young-love movie, but not one done in that glossy, Hollywood, high-concept manner we've become accustomed to. One that was, for lack of a better way of putting it, a little more ambiguous, '70s-style, where everyone was flawed, middle-class characters.
The "Lucifer Effect" describes the point in time when an ordinary, normal person first crosses the boundary between good and evil to engage in an evil action. It represents a transformation of human character that is significant in its consequences. Such transformations are more likely to occur in novel settings, in "total situations," where social situational forces are sufficiently powerful to overwhelm, or set aside temporally, personal attributes of morality, compassion, or sense of justice and fair play.
People of good character are not all going to come down on the same side of difficult political and social issues. Good people - people of character and moral literacy - can be conservative, and good people can be liberal. We must not permit our disputes over thorny political questions to obscure the obligation we have to offer instruction to all our young people in the area in which we have, as a society, reached a consensus: namely, on the importance of good character, and some of its pervasive particulars.
Nationality is not a universal human principle but an historical, local fact...Every nation, even a small one, has its own character, its own particular way of life and manner of speaking, feeling, thinking, and behaving. These distinctive features are the essence of nationality, the product of a nation's entire history and conditions of existence. Every nation, like every individual, is of necessity what it is, and has an unquestionable right to be itself. So-called national rights consist precisely of this.
In the theater the audience is generally riveted to a single angle of observation. The movie director, though, can rapidly shift from objective to subjective--and to any number of subjective points of view--and in so doing seem to pull the audience directly inside the frame of his picture, giving the spectator the sense of experiencing an action from the viewpoint of a participant. Identification of the viewer with the film character, then, can be much more intimate than the analogous situation in the theater.
As a young filmmaker, I shot a lot of stuff because I wanted to make sure that I got everything, but now I've gotten much more precise with my shooting. Editing is a whole other layer because then, sometimes you realize characters don't even need to say this or that. It becomes an issue of exposition, and over-explaining something. In the script, I'd reinforce certain things about what I wanted people to know two or three times, but in the editing room, I'd be like, "I only need to say this once, maybe twice."
Life for women in ancient Greece was hard - you had to fight for every inch of ground you got. Both Thetis and Briseis are strong, passionate women and in another time and place their lives would have been very different. Part of the tragedy of their characters is how much they have to offer - and how little of that they get to realize. Thetis spends the whole novel fighting the limitations placed on her, desperately trying to eke out the best she can from a bad situation. This makes her fierce and terrifying.
Many writers write across difference of one kind or another. Sometimes the difference is large and recognizable: gender, or race, or religion, or sexuality. And sometimes the differences are smaller. ... Where authors get into trouble is in trying to make those different characters stand in for whole groups of people, or for creating characters only to fetishize or explore their supposed otherness. Your character can be wildly different from you, as long as he's written with respect and, moreover, specificity.
Absolutely. I think, I think the American people, at their core, are a decent people. I think that we still have prejudice in our midst, but I think that the vast majority of Americans are willing, are willing to judge people on the basis of their ideas and their character. And in the case of the presidency, I think what's most important is whether the American people think that you understand their hopes and dreams and struggles and whether they think you can actually help them achieve those hopes and dreams.
I think we're always trying to avoid tropes. And I think that "Game of Thrones" has almost made killing people a cliche. For us, it wasn't about that. For six episodes, it's hard to invest in people, and I think when you kill a main character on television it really needs to mean something. So we certainly had talked about that, and I think we managed to juggle the ball to make a gripping, interesting and compelling finale. We feel that we didn't have to go there at this point because we had such few episodes.
Number one, it is important that we fix the legal immigration system, because right now we've got a backlog that means years for people to apply legally. And what's worse is, we keep on increasing the fees, so that if you've got a hard working immigrant family, they've got to hire a lawyer; they've got to pay thousands of dollars in fees. They just can't afford it. And it's discriminatory against people who have good character, we should want in this country, but don't have the money. So we've got to fix that.