Quotes on Character

Making a movie where the central character is a horse was a challenge. Because I'm scared of riding. I was thrown as a kid. One of my daughters is a competitive jumper, we live with horses, we have stables on our property. But I don't ride. I observe, and I worry.

Character is the ability of a person to see a positive end of things. This is the hope that a man of character has.

There's no better way to test a person than to put them in the middle of a war. That's clearly going to show what kind of a character you're telling a story about.

Dignity does not consist in possessing honors, but in deserving them.

Comedy needs to happen naturally and be in touch with the character. When you see that guy in your office that everybody laughs at, he doesn't think he's funny. He's just being him, and that's the joke.

Of course I know that the twins are only words on a page, and I'm certainly not the sort of writer who talks to his characters or harbours any illusions about the creative process. But at the same time, I think it's juvenile and arrogant when literary writers compulsively remind their readers that the characters aren't real. People know that already. The challenge is to make an intelligent reader suspend disbelief, to seduce them into the reality of a narrative.

After a while, the characters I'm writing begin to feel real to me. That's when I know I'm heading in the right direction

Though I still turn up my coat-collar in a lonely way and am always looking at myself in mirrors, they’re only habits and give no clue at all to my character, whatever that is. The most difficult performance in the world is acting naturally isn’t it? Everything else is artful.

Whenever I switch from one character to another, there's always a few days where I really struggle because I'm changing voices and I'm changing ways of looking at the world. I'm not just flicking a switch; it's harder process than that.

Knowledge is essential to conquest; only according to our ignorance are we helpless. Thought creates character. Character can dominate conditions. Will creates circumstances and environment.

Nothing brings out the lower traits of human nature like office-seeking. Men of good character and impulses are betrayed by it into all sorts of meanness.

What I have in common with the character in 'Truman' is this incredible need to please people. I feel like I want to take care of everyone and I also feel this terrible guilt if I am unable to. And I have felt this way ever since all this success started.

Heart is what drives us and determines our fate. That is what I need for my characters in my books: a passionate heart. I need mavericks, dissidents, adventurers, outsiders and rebels, who ask questions, bend the rules and take risks.

When an audience is laughing with a character, they make themselves so vulnerable, and they open up. They expose their heart the moment they're laughing, because they're relaxed and they're disarmed.

What I did was take the Jesus of the Gospels, the Son of God, the Son of the Virgin Mary, and sought to make Him utterly believable, a vital breathing character.

I see God now as an unimaginative writer of popular fictions, someone who builds stories around sadistic and graceless plots, narratives that exist only to express His terror of a woman's power to choose who and how to love, to redefine love as she sees fit, not as God thinks it ought to be. The author is unworthy of His own characters.

To be true to life, a novel must have an ending that is inevitable given the specific personalities of the characters involved. The novelist must not impose an ending upon them.

What I've always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characters, and also my own, intersect with the public life of the culture.

It is futile to put personality ahead of character, to try to improve relationships with others before improving ourselves.

Reading fiction not only develops our imagination and creativity, it gives us the skills to be alone. It gives us the ability to feel empathy for people we've never met, living lives we couldn't possibly experience for ourselves, because the book puts us inside the character's skin.

We judge individual man and women as we do nations and races -- by the character of their achievement and by their achievement of character.