Quotes About Creating Characters

#1. Creating characters is just another way to express a type and put that type to use.

Lily Tomlin

#2. I do have a huge fascination for science, and I love to hear what my dad has to say. He used to take me into minor surgeries when I was a kid and let me watch, so I definitely have a passion for it, but it's not as big a passion as I have for acting and creating characters.

Daniela Ruah

#3. I think much has been made of this alter ego business. I mean, I actually stopped creating characters in 1975 - for albums, anyway.

David Bowie

#4. Outlining is not writing. Coming up with ideas is not writing. Researching is not writing. Creating characters is not writing. Only writing is writing.

Harlan Coben

#5. I have made a career of creating characters who fight school authority and chomp at the bit to get out into the 'real' world and live their lives, mostly because that's the kind of teenager I was.

Chris Crutcher

#6. The acting is more of a secondary thing for me now. I will be in it, if I'm the best man for the job, but it really is about creating characters and shows.

Jason Gann

#7. I think being an activist and an artist is an interesting contradiction, because so often they are at odds with one another. When you write as an artist you have to clean the palate of your own politics in creating characters and activism is kind of the exact opposite.

Eve Ensler

#8. I love creating characters that people may or may have not ever seen before. But I enjoy the opportunity to try to make something new, and that's when I really come alive as an actor, so I really enjoyed working on 'Arrow.'

J. August Richards

#9. I go through a whole process with the actors first, building and creating characters, then I encourage them to sort of live in that character when they're in the screen.

Keenen Ivory Wayans

#10. I believe that the writer should tell a story. I believe in plot. I believe in creating characters and suspense.

Ernest Gaines

#11. One of the challenges is creating characters. I am trying to compose my sentences to express epic events happening to ordinary people.

Andrea Hirata

#12. I just love that feeling of being in another world, of creating characters and watching where they go.

Caroline Leavitt

#13. I love coming up with the stories and being creative and working with creative people and coming up with visuals and creating characters.

Roberta Williams

#14. When I'm creating characters, I definitely think of theme songs. Writing for me is very visual, so I sometimes think of it in terms of a movie with a soundtrack, and try to transfer that to words.

Marisha Pessl

#15. I understood, through rehab, things about creating characters. I understood that creating whole people means knowing where we come from, how we can make a mistake and how we overcome things to make ourselves stronger.

Samuel L. Jackson

#16. For modeling, I was always creating characters. I dress like a tomboy. So, when I'd go into a shoot, there'd be all these dresses, and I'd say to myself, 'Okay, this isn't me. It's somebody else. So, who is this person?' Acting is the next level of that.

Agyness Deyn

#17. I'm a neurotic New York Jew by birth. Creating characters is second nature to me.

Len Wein

#18. My role in 'Legally Blonde' was really rewarding, because I had so much fun working on the movie. I've had really rewarding experiences on tiny low budget films that you'll never see but where I had a cool time creating characters as well. I love almost all of the characters I've played.

Alanna Ubach

#19. When I'm creating characters, I just want to create characters that I can relate to, and be as honest about them as people as I can be. That's what I want to see when I go to the movies.

Nicole Holofcener

#20. I love creating characters and becoming someone else entirely.

Brina Palencia

#21. I did private study for about a month, five days a week, six hours a day. I came to understand the character in ways that I never would've previous to that. I was so innocent in respect to ways of creating characters.

Corin Nemec

#22. The easier you make it look, the more difficult it is. Creating characters out of nothing, and making them interesting - and that's another advice I would give to writers.

Jackie Collins

#23. I think it is all about creating characters, mixing them up with the stars and the light-years, and coming back to Earth, because we're from this universe. We're not just New York or London; we're stars.

Benjamin Clementine

#24. I try to get roles that challenge me in what I can do and who I think I can portray. For me, it's about creating characters with really fascinating stories, because that's what I like to watch on TV.

Tatiana Maslany

#25. Creating characters is easy. It's getting them to behave that's the problem.

Steven Ramirez

#26. Creating characters is like throwing together ingredients for a recipe. I take characteristics I like and dislike in real people I know, or know of, and use them to embellish and define characters.

Cassandra Clare

#27. Nothing can compare to creating characters and worlds out of thin air with your friends and making a book exactly the way you think it should be made, pure creative freedom, purity of intention, with no boundaries.

Rick Remender

#28. I write a ridiculous number of drafts. The characters change and grow through the drafting, and my understanding of them deepens. Creating characters in a novel is like shooting at clay pigeons and missing, and then missing more productively as the narrative continues.

Robert Boswell

#29. I used to spend a lot of time alone as a kid, creating characters and doing voices in my room, and I thought to myself, I'm either going to go absolutely nuts, or I'm going to find something to put that energy into.

Rami Malek

#30. What I love most about being a writer is the opportunity to "play Goddess" by creating happy endings for people I care about (my characters) and being able to work in my robe!

Laura Abbot

#31. Once you get into a feature, whether it's a sequel or an original one, you have to start all over again, and you're creating a world, creating new characters. You're also tracking emotions. You're trying to create emotion and create a character that you can fall in love with for two hours.

Dan Scanlon

#32. Voice isn't fixed or unmalleable, it adapts to the characters you are creating and the story being told. I suppose in some way that's true in life - a little flexibility goes a long way.

Ayana Mathis

#33. Before you start production, you have characters you have created without actors in mind, then all of a sudden you've got actors. They bring an enormous amount in creating these characters, and creating the dynamics between the characters that you've written.

Charlie Kaufman

#34. I started as a playwright. Any sort of scriptwriting you do helps you hone your story. You have the same demands of creating a plot, developing relatable characters and keeping your audience invested in your story. My books are basically structured like three-act plays.

Suzanne Collins

#35. 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

#36. For any actor, when you're playing twin brothers, you have to be able to find the similarities between them as well as creating a difference between the two characters. If they just looked the same, what would the point of that be?

Efren Ramirez

#37. Usually, the creating of the book happens while I'm writing the book. I start with Chapter One, with a few ideas and a handful of characters, and the book grows from there.

Lily King

#38. I do love doing films; I love going out and creating different characters for each film, and not having to be stuck with one role for many, many years. It's a creative liberty that I love.

Malin Akerman

#39. I think it's the source material. 27 Dresses was a famous book, and Devil Wears Prada was also a wonderful book, so it's coming out of the novelists who are really creating these wonderful female characters that we want to see on the big screen.

Jerry Bruckheimer

#40. Creating a novel means moving into the past, the hoped for, the imagined. It is an emotional journey, fraught at times with characters who don't always do or say what a writer wishes.

Jacqueline Woodson

#41. I think of setting as almost a character of its own, influencing the other characters in ways they're not even aware of. So much of the success of a good ghost story rides on creating a creepy atmosphere; details of the landscape itself can help create a sense of dread.

Jennifer McMahon

#42. I'm all about real drama, real performance, and real people, so my twist on this is: I'm creating a family, a brotherhood here. I'm creating a very real chemistry and I have this incredible ensemble of actors led by Will Smith, who are basically playing dimensional characters with lives and souls.

David Ayer

#43. The way of creating believable characters is not by conforming to a set of PC rules.

Mark Haddon

#44. With every episodic, there's a learning curve where writers try to find the voice of the characters by way of the actors. Many details are found along the way. On 'Caprica,' although the franchise already existed, we were creating an entirely new world full of new characters.

Sasha Roiz

#45. I've always loved film and wanted to work in film. I just love working and creating new characters, and trying different genres and different things.

Alison Brie

#46. I love creating stories, dreaming up characters and breathing life into them. From several generations of Irish storytellers, I think that's what I was born to do.

Linda Conrad

#47. There are certain types of slightly hysterical human characters who, rather than creating, walk around with a sense of their own potential - it's as if they themselves were art objects. They feel as if their lives are written narratives, or pieces of music.

Rachel Cusk

#48. Marvel's got a crowded universe, and there are already so many characters hogging the spotlight that it's hard to break through that. First off, whatever character you're creating, odds are, there's already someone similar in one way or another.

Kurt Busiek

#49. I work very hard at creating complex characters, a mix of positives and negatives. They are all flawed. I believe flaws are almost universal, and they help us understand, sympathise and, paradoxically, feel closer to such characters.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

#50. In creating the Harry Potter artwork, I try to bring a certain amount of realism and believability to the characters and setting, but still add an element of wonder and the unknown.

Mary Grandpre

#51. You definitely do not do films for that particular reason. You do them for yourself, for your satisfaction of creating this thing with characters and watching these characters take on real life - that's all you care about.

Clint Eastwood

#52. Something that I really enjoy doing is creating and being a part of very different characters and very different projects.

Noel Fisher

#53. No, there isn't a particular type of genre that I'm drawn to. I'm more drawn to the possibility of creating different characters, or being able to go from one genre to the other and to show that I could do it, that I could be good at it.

Freddy Rodriguez

#54. There are characters which are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them. Their susceptibilities will clash against objects that remain innocently quiet.

George Eliot

#55. I love writing, and I love the solitude of the writing, in that you're just sitting there creating something from nothing, or a new story for characters you love and care about.

John Wells

#56. Being able to improvise is the basis for creating all characters and situations, for everything to do with performing, really. And it's good therapy as well.

Chris Kattan

#57. At the beginning of a new project, often before I do any actual writing, I collect photos, quotes, song lyrics, and even objects that relate to the characters or the world I'm creating.

Kami Garcia

#58. Writing historical novels can be dangerous. We need to be as accurate and as fair about the historical record as we can be, at the same time as creating our fictional characters and, hopefully, telling a good story. The challenge is weaving the fiction into the history.

Edward Rutherfurd

#59. I think the thing I took most from game playing was just getting in the characters head. I took it really seriously. There's something about creating your character.

Drew Goddard

#60. A successful direct action is like creating a good fantasy story. It's like a quest," Phillips said excitedly in the introduction. "There is a conflict, compelling characters, a good plan, build up, twists and turns, adversity, the climax, and then the win

Anonymous

#61. My novels tend to come about from a fusion of two big ideas, creating a critical mass that then fissions, throwing off hundreds of other particles, riffs, tropes and characters.

Will Self

#62. I enjoy creating and developing characters, as well as situations. But I have always had more ideas than I can ever put down on paper and fantasy allows me to include a lot of what I feel.

Raymond Buckland

#63. Pixar's short films convinced Disney that if the company could produce memorable characters within five minutes, then the confidence was there in creating a feature film with those abilities in story and character development.

John Lasseter

#64. We're lucky enough, especially in these 'Madagascar' films, to be working with some of the best people in the industry, who are not only great actors, but great comedians and improvisers and filmmakers. And they then become a part of creating their characters.

Eric Darnell

#65. I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters.

Lydia Davis

#66. I've done a number of films. I've been around this. I think the biggest challenge is just getting the script right, the way that you want the script to be. It's really about capturing the complexity of emotions and creating the kind of characters that people will want to watch every week.

Nicholas Sparks

#67. Before I write the first page of a novel, I spend a long time creating detailed backgrounds for my characters. I imagine the experiences that have formed them, what makes them happy, angry, fearful, and what they yearn for.

Lisa Kleypas

#68. I've sort of prided myself on playing characters with conscience. The first way I go about creating a character is looking at that area of conscience. What have they done, and what has it cost.

Lorraine Toussaint