Black Character Quotes

#1. I think every time you take a female character, a black character, a Hispanic character, a gay character, and make that the point of the character, you are minimalizing the character,

Len Wein

#2. Even in 2012, if there's a black character in the movies or on television that's a professional, if we even hear about their backgrounds they're always 'up from the streets.'

Stephen Carter

#3. There haven't been enough profound things written about what being black means and what a black character is. Nobody knows.

James Earl Jones

#4. I've always had an interest in complicating the way that we perceive the black character, whether it's the black academic or scholar or activist or black intellectual.

Rashid Johnson

#5. The norm is white, apparently, in the view of people who see things in that way. For them, the only reason you would introduce a black character is to introduce this kind of abnormality. Usually, it's because you're telling a story about racism or at least about race.

Octavia E. Butler

#6. I can't think straight around her. I think love
is turning me into a Disney character. Damn it. I always
thought I'd be someone interesting out of a Star Trek
episode, but I kind of want to break into a song a little.
Just a little.

Lexi Blake

#7. Phillip Roth uses his Black women characters to make anti intellectual remarks about Black history month, begun by a man who reached intellectual heights that Roth will never attain.Roth is a petty bigot and his ignorant remarks about black culture expose him as a buffoon to scholars the world over.

Ishmael Reed

#8. My film (Black Venus) had been very emotionally draining and difficult because I had identified so much with the lead character, Saartjie Baartman.

Abdellatif Kechiche

#9. No one is black and white or good or bad or happy or sad or what have you. [All have] particular idiosyncrasies that make them fascinating and that's how I tend to approach a character.

Cary Elwes

#10. Creating a world that reflects the inner voyage of our characters was really important. Also, because this isn't a black and white show, and this isn't about bad guys and good guys, but it's about good men being capable of bad things and vice versa, I wanted to be in a city that had contradiction.

Veena Sud

#11. A character is never entirely white or black, there's never entirely right or wrong. You have to realize sometimes you face something, and then you change your mind, or then you realize you were wrong.

Berenice Bejo

#12. That's what he was saying, the civil rights movement - judge me for my character, not how black my skin is, not how yellow my skin is, how short I am, how tall or fat or thin; It's by my character.

Pam Grier

#13. The Black Mountain poet I like most is the early Creeley. Those early poems seem very lyrical and very traditional, with a lot of voice and character.

Robert Morgan

#14. There's not a woman in the book, the plot hinges on unkindness to animals, and the black characters mostly drown by Chapter 29.

P. J. O'Rourke

#15. Find your self love. Find that precious thing inside you that
makes you want to live. And when you've found it, hold on to it with one
hand, and use the other to claw your way back home.
-Ripple

Valjeanne Jeffers

#16. The way I wanted to write it, is with a hero, or sort of a pure character who was the protagonist. And the antagonists were these demonic evil children, cause when you're a kid, seven or eight years old, and you're looking at the world around you - everything seems black or white, good or bad.

John Wozniak

#17. Chavez made a compete fool of himself in front of the entire world while giving the U.N. a black eye. But the real losers are the Venezuelan people who have to put up with this unstable character every day.

J. D. Hayworth

#18. In 1977, I wrote a series of poems about a character, Black Bart, a former cattle rustler-turned-alchemist. A good friend, Claude Purdy, who is a stage director, suggested I turn the poems into a play.

August Wilson

#19. We are real black characters with real character, not the stars of American racist spectacle. Blackness is not probable cause.

Kiese Laymon

#20. The privilege, and the challenges, of taking on Black Widow have never been lost on me. I worked on the first 'Spiderman' game as well as 'Fantastic Four,' and I had always wanted to be able to tell more of a character-driven comic book story than was possible to fit into a game narrative.

Margaret Stohl

#21. If you're doing something on an interesting scale that involves an entire universe of characters, one way to unite them is to have them all undergo a common experience, and there is something at Christmas that unites everybody. It already sets a stage within the stage.

Shane Black

#22. The characters that I have on Twitter have very little resemblance to me, the person who's writing them.

Michael Ian Black

#23. There are expectations in how you play your character as a black woman, to be sassy and the same kind of feel, as if there are no quirky black women. I struggle with those things constantly, trying to add dimension to my work, and that's the goal, too.

Nicole Beharie

#24. I would love to do a Black Widow movie. That's perfect, I would love to do that. That character is really interesting: she doesn't have any superpowers; she just has extraordinary skills, and the world that she comes from, being this ex-K.G.B. assassin, I find that really fascinating, yeah.

Neil Marshall

#25. I say they had character because, while they did wrong things, they always tried to do them in the right way and at the right time.

Jack Black

#26. In papergaming, players can look at a character sheet of their own creation and see all of their skills, right there, in black and white.

Warren Spector

#27. My character on 'Orange is the New Black' is not one that requires being absolutely shredded with 5% body fat. But I wouldn't be opposed to doing that for a role one day.

Matt McGorry

#28. Just because the character listens to an iPod and wears black nail polish, she's goth. That was just a misused word.

Rooney Mara

#29. I'm doing a film called 'Black Mass' where I play James Bulger. The reason to play him is obvious to me. He's a fascinating character. It's not like anything I've done before on that level. I'm very excited to slide into that skin for a little bit.

Johnny Depp

#30. It's such a deliberate thing to sit down and write a tweet. You're putting yourself out there in a very deliberate way, and over however many tweets, you start to create a character for yourself.

Michael Ian Black

#31. My first serious attempts at writing were made in 1868, and I took up two very different lines of composition; I wrote some short stories of a very flimsy type, and also a work of a much more ambitious character, 'The Lives of the Black Letter Saints.'

Annie Besant

#32. 'The Butler' has virtually nothing in common with its source material, the life of White House butler Gene Allen, except for the fact that the main character of the film and Allen were both black butlers in the White House.

Ben Shapiro

#33. One of the things I'm concerned about is that I really want to make sure the races of all the characters are kept. I don't like it when black characters become white in movies, or things like that.

Neil Gaiman

#34. The lack of moral character is the number one problem in the black community today

Jesse Lee Peterson

#35. There are many movies which come with an attitude of black and white. I am good and you are bad. And there are many movies that are also trying to see the reality as it is or to discover what really is behind the character or events.

Ashraf Barhom

#36. Black leadership has to recognize that principles more than speech, character more than a claim, is greater in advancing the cause of our liberation than what has transpired thus far.

Louis Farrakhan

#37. To me, you couldn't write a character like J. Edgar Hoover and have it be believable. I mean, he was a crock pot of eccentricities. We couldn't even fit all his eccentricities into [ the same named] movie.

Dustin Lance Black

#38. I'm a huge fan of 'Kung Fu Panda.' I honestly think that Jack Black's voice work in 'Kung Fu Panda' is the best voice work that's ever been done. He's so funny, and it's such an endearing character. It really is great.

John Requa

#39. Standing at the original Victorian counter was a man in a long black leather coat. His hair had been grown to counteract its unequivocal retreat from the top of his head, and was fashioned into a mean, frail ponytail that hung limply down his back. Blooms of acne highlighted his vampire-white skin.

Julia Stuart

#40. There has been a big debate about it: can a black man play a Nordic character?

Idris Elba

#41. Life was hard. Life was good. Most folks think this a contradiction, but I have learned that the hardest, most difficult times of my life caused the most growth in my character.

Chuck Black

#42. To me the industry has always said that the lovers and haters and principal characters will always be white in Hollywood, and black people will always be appendages of those kinds of dramas, or they will be comedic outlets. It will never change.

Haile Gerima

#43. When your characters are not white hats or black hats but something in between, you do have to be very careful about your details. So, that takes a while. I'm not interested in white hats and black hats. I don't think that's how people are in real life.

Victor Levin

#44. I can never kind of fathom a character's journey beyond the moment when you go to black, any more than when people ask me what Jason Patric did with the tape recorder at the end of 'Narc,' you know what I mean? Even in 'Blood, Guts,' like, what happens down the road with these characters?

Joe Carnahan

#45. Jay Lethal doing that Black Machsimo character, as good as that was, it was fantastic and so entertaining. But now Jay Lethal has turned himself into this very formidable, dominant world champion, who is having some of the best matches in the entire world. So it's really cool.

Adam Cole

#46. In Men in Black, it was a very small character, no pun intended.

Verne Troyer

#47. As Danton sees it, the most bizarre aspect of Camille's character is his desire to scribble over every blank surface; he sees a guileless piece of paper, virgin and harmless, and persecutes it till it is black with words, and then besmirches its sister, and so on, through the quire.

Hilary Mantel

#48. I really love the idea of the poetically mad - the character that is imbued with the romantic madness. Like River from 'Firefly' or Drusilla from 'Buffy.' Someone dangerously unhinged, where you're really not sure they're going to be reliable minute-to-minute.

Holly Black

#49. I think it's a wonderful thing to have African-American characters. Look at life. It's not a white world or a black world; there are all kind of people in it. It's showing growth, and in today's world there are so many outlets.

Darius McCrary

#50. The only black people you found were occasional characters or characters who were so feeble-witted that they couldn't manage anything, anyway. I wrote myself in, since I'm me and I'm here and I'm writing.

Octavia Butler

#51. To reject the notions of the eternal feminine, the black soul, or the Jewish character is not to deny that there are today Jews, blacks, or women: this denial is not a liberation for those concerned but an inauthentic flight.

Simone De Beauvoir

#52. When I was on 'One Life to Live,' I always wanted to delve into my character, Layla, to find out why she was the black sheep of the family. I so wanted to have some edge. I have no idea why there was a reluctance to do that or why we so rarely see it.

Tika Sumpter

#53. 'Blade' was amazing; I can't imagine the character without Wesley Snipes. He just made a long, black leather trench coat look so cool.

Kat Graham

#54. A hound it was, an enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen.

Arthur Conan Doyle

#55. Even as a stage performer, I have my garb which is leather jackets and black jeans to make me feel a certain way. The wardrobe is really important to feeling the character you're playing.

Andrew Dice Clay

#56. I have a color-coded computer spreadsheet that divides things down to chapter fragments. Each character's point-of-view is a different color. The text of the manuscript is color-coded the same way. The last thing I do before submitting the manuscript is turn all those colors back to black.

Neal Shusterman

#57. When introducing a character, you're usually better off sticking with broad strokes. The important thing at that point is not what color hair someone has or how tall they are, but rather, what kind of person they are.

Jason Black

#58. There are black men who are madly in love with white women. God bless them, if that's what works for them. I just hope that we can strike a balance that portrays black folks and the black family in a light that's not extreme. Those are the types of characters that I find myself attracted to.

Nia Long

#59. Our character isn't defined by the battles we win or lose, but by the battles we dare to fight.

Robert Beatty

#60. All actors bring something unexpected to the role because they have to translate what's on the page and make a real character out of the black-and-white text that's there in the script.

Joe Johnston

#61. Being an actor myself I realize that all actors believe they are qualified to play any role. If you showed me a script with a black woman character I would tell you that I could do it. That is what we do. We act as if we are someone else.

Richard Masur

#62. As a feminist, just to speak to what women go through, I think women are put in a box way too often. What I love about 'You're the Worst' is that no female character is portrayed as a black-and-white cartoon character. We're all complicated, messy human beings.

Kether Donohue

#63. I used to need the character but as I've gotten older I need it less and less - I prefer to play some version of myself. To approach any acting job as me just being me.

Michael Ian Black

#64. Twenty-five, 30 years ago, the barometer of human rights in the United States were black people. That is no longer true. The barometer for judging the character of people in regard to human rights is now those who consider themselves gay, homosexual, lesbian.

Bayard Rustin

#65. I'm not a fast writer, and I find the process of writing a first draft to be painful and frustrating. Usually, I start with a character, a premise, and some image that gives me a particular feeling.

Holly Black

#66. a black granite cube containing only the character mu

Patti Smith

#67. A person's character, I realize, is never black-and-white. There is so much gray.

Jessica Warman

#68. There is no ordinary run of mankind, there are only individuals who are totally different. And whether a man is naked and black and stands on one foot in Sudan or is clothed in some kind of costume in a bus in England, they are still individuals of entirely different characters.

Evelyn Waugh

#69. In terms of the black female audience, usually if you're true to that character but more so in your body of work if you've proven that you love your sisters and you proven you will come back home like in 42.4% they'll give you a pass when you jump ship. I hear it all the time.

Blair Underwood

#70. It's good to play something that's black and white, and a guy that sees right and wrong. I've never played a character like that.

David Lyons

#71. Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet.

Robert E. Howard

#72. Certainly as a kid, I grew up with Batman, Superman, whoever - they didn't need to be black for me to relate to them. But when a character like Cyborg came along, I got excited, because he looked a little bit more like me; his experiences were a little bit more like mine.

John Ridley

#73. Lordy, lordy, lordy do I love money. It is a character flaw, no doubt, one that springs from a panicked childhood in which I always felt as if our family was only a couple missed child support payments from being tossed onto the pitiless streets of our suburban New Jersey town.

Michael Ian Black

#74. This is only a record of broken and apparently unrelated memories, some of them as distinct and sequent as brilliant beads upon a thread, others remote and strange, having the character of crimson dreams with interspaces blank and black
witch-fires glowing still and red in a great desolation.

Ambrose Bierce

#75. I don't think Steve Scalise has a racist bone in his body. Steve and I have worked on issues that benefit poor people, black people, white people, Jewish people. I know his character.

Cedric Richmond

#76. So, that's okay. It's not like you're turning into an Endarkened or something, like Kellen's evil stepbrother Anigrel the Black.

Mercedes Lackey