Character Quotes

I'm looking forward to becoming a marvelous - excuse the word marvelous - character actress. like Marie Dressler, like Will Rogers.

Sometimes I've been to a party where no one spoke to me for a whole evening. The men, frightened by their wives or sweeties, would give me a wide berth. And the ladies would gang up in a corner to discuss my dangerous character.

A man's character may be learned from the adjectives which he habitually uses in conversation.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education.

I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

You can tell alot about a fellow's character by his way of eating jellybeans.

A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercises, I advise the gun. While this gives moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise and independence to the mind. Games played with the ball, and others of that nature, are too violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun therefore be your constant companion of your walks.

The public character of every public servant is legitimate subject of discussion, and his fitness or unfitness for office may be fairly canvassed by any person.

Our immigration system is a broken system that needs to be fixed. We need reform that provides hardworking people of good character with a real path towards citizenship.

Of all virtues and dignities of the mind, goodness is the greatest, being the character of the Deity; and without it, man is a busy, mischievous, wretched thing.

I'm always happier and a better actor when I can really lose myself in a character and become somebody else.

An individual step in character training is to put responsibility on the individual.

Like at Halloween: I knew I'd arrived when I saw people dressing up on Halloween as my character.

Actors are hard to photograph because they never want to reveal who they are. You don't know if you're getting a character from a Chekhov play or a Polanski film. It depends what mood they're in.

The core character of Victorians is one of aspiration and ambition, and Victorians have, since first settlement days... demonstrated that core character over and over again.

Tom Bosley may have passed, but through that part and that character, a part of him will live on forever.

By a great man, however, we mean a man who, because of his spiritual gifts, his character, and other qualities, deserves to be called great and who as a result earns the power to influence others.

In the best farce today we start with some absurd premise as to character or situation, but if the premises be once granted we move logically enough to the ending.

When I do a mask, I do try to put a lot of character and a lot of expression into the sculpt.

When I have to play the same role every day, I have the flexibility to play the character in so many different ways. It's almost like playing five different roles.

I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure.

Character builds slowly, but it can be torn down within incredible swiftness.

I look for an interesting and often times, fresh character. Something different that what is done all the time or than I've done recently. I look at who is directing. Those two variables as well as a third, which is the content and the quality of the screenplay. I look at the arcs of the scenes and characters and relationships.

I like the idea of movies having a magic element. How many times have you seen an actor in a movie who you know only as the character? It's wonderful, isn't it?

My hope is that people will be repulsed by the character's complete lack of ethics and obsession with consumerism - that's what I was saying about the difference between the character's message and the film's message.

When it comes to films, people often don't differentiate between the message of a bad central character and the message of the film itself. They are two separate things.

But I learned that there's a certain character that can be built from embarrassing yourself endlessly. If you can sit happy with embarrassment, there's not much else that can really get to ya.

I think all writers are armchair psychologists to some degree or another, and I think a character's sexuality is fascinating. It's a great way to really get at the root of their identity, because it's such a personal thing.

Ultimately, physical resemblance isn't as important as whether this person can bring this character to life in a way that's compelling and makes me care about what happens to them.

There are two ways to go about it. You can take a compass and draw a perfect circle and make two perfect eyes as neat as can be. Or you can do it freehand and have some fun with it. Like I did. Give it character.

Education commences at the mother's knee, and every word spoken within hearsay of little children tends toward the formation of character.

If you can jump up onstage and make people laugh, shouldn't you also be able to inhabit a character?

The more I love the character, the harder it is to get it wrong. I have to get to a point that I can speak for them.

I don't like to come at my character from some really technical place.

I get inhabited by a character and then you mourn it. There's a period of mourning for me, definitely.

Picasso is a character that has pursued me for a long time and I always rejected. He deserves a lot of respect because I am from Malaga, and I was born four blocks from where he was born.

When you go to the movie theater and the opening of this movie and you see the kids just cracking up with a character you are giving your voice to, you get goose bumps. It's so beautiful.

It's a character that I always found really likable. I'm fond of Zorro because he was a popular figure who worked for the people.

Whenever people say they didn't like the main character of a book, they mean they didn't like the book. The main character has to be a friend? I don't get that.

I wouldn't like to be a character in one of my books!

Great ambition is the passion of a great character. Those endowed with it may perform very good or very bad acts. All depends on the principles which direct them.

Our character is what we do when we think no one is looking.

Life is a quarry, out of which we are to mold and chisel and complete a character.

I really liked drama and being in plays, so when I was playing a character onstage and I could act like somebody else, then I wasn't scared or nervous, but I didn't like meeting new people when I had to be myself. That was scary.

Strong female characters - even if they don't necessarily make the same decisions that we might - make such great narrative material, especially when there's an equally strong male character in the mix.

All of my characters are a little bit based on people I know in real life. You know when you do that you have to change the character a little bit in case your friend or your relative reads the book, because you don't want them to know you wrote about them... They might get mad.

Whenever people get to see you, it's a great thing. Once people see an image and see the character, they can get into the music a lot more.

At 24, my head was as shiny as a cue ball on a billiard table. I naturally thought this meant curtains. Actually, I found it helped. When I was too young to play real character parts, they mistook me for older because of the bald noggin. I got juicy roles right from the start.

I don't want a perfect character, I want a character who has, as strange as it sounds, some humanity, some flaws, some needs.

At a young age, I was interested in comic books, which was really how I learnt to read. The name Cage came from a comic book character called Power Man.

I hit the ground running, without a lot of training, so I had to do whatever I could do to survive as a professional, and if that meant being that character 24/7 and acting out, I was going to do that. I lived those characters, I brought them home with me.

Hollywood didn't know if I was an actor or a nut or if I was this crazy character I was playing. I had developed an image of being a little bit unusual, different and wild.

I've made the transition from star to character actor and I'm thoroughly enjoying it.

To disappear your complete self into a character is quite difficult. I've tried it 85 times, and I've succeeded two or three times.

Character, I am sure, lies in the genes.

Your work isn't just to learn and say the lines. Your work is to figure out what the chatter in your brain is, that's going on under the lines. It doesn't matter whether you're speaking or not speaking because your mind is working the way your character's mind would work.

I get sent a lot of scripts which feature him as a kind of all-purpose Victorian literary character and really understand little, if anything, about him, his life or his books.

We have the character of an island nation: independent, forthright, passionate in defence of our sovereignty. We can no more change this British sensibility than we can drain the English Channel. And because of this sensibility, we come to the European Union with a frame of mind that is more practical than emotional.

I started writing morning pages just to keep my hand in, you know, just because I was a writer and I didn't know what else to do but write. And then one day as I was writing, a character came sort of strolling in and I realized, Oh my God, I don't have to be just a screenwriter. I can write novels.

I don't have any complex plans for playing a character. I think all I try to do is not make too many bad guy faces and not ever try to seem too good. I just try to put it in the middle somewhere.

Actors who say they can dive inside a character are either schizophrenic or lying.

You're being cast for your acting ability. It's not based on the way your body functions. If you're playing a lead in a movie, it's for that character and they'll tailor it to you. In a dance company, you have to fit in a definite mold.

I think I may have become an actor to hide from myself. You can escape into a character.

You can escape into a character.

I like flawed characters very much. A lot of times I get asked to do parts that are kind of small but key - three-scene roles that are three kick-ass scenes. Growing up, watching as many movies as I did, I was always into character actors like that.

Well, I am a lot like my dad, and the character of Ted is based on my dad.

The beautiful thing about acting is that you can just dive into the character, strip yourself of everything, and just get in there and perfect your craft.

I think being mean to people in high school is healthy. It's sort of like you're in this situation with all these other kids and sometimes you need to get your aggression out. And if you'd had people be mean to you before, it really does build character.

I think it's necessary to identify with anything - with any character you play, there's got to be something in common, so you can link up to that person, even if it's like one tiny thing. But it's equally fun to play somebody completely different, and trying to find what that thing is to make it.

I try to bring elements of my own personality to every character I've played, but I think I'm pretty similar to the character I'm playing now. The biggest departure would have to have been Freaks and Geeks Sara, who was this sort of subordinate and shy girl.

There are not that many jobs as an actor where you don't get to know what your character will be doing from episode to episode.

I like diversity; I want one character to be very different from the next. I love to live with a character for a long time if I can, but I like one character to be different from the next.

You know, the hard thing about audiences not liking what a character does is that they sometimes take it out on the actor personally. That's something that you know when you become an actor or actress, but it's always hard to deal with when it actually happens.

It's interesting when you're trying to create a character in animation. It's really a communal effort.